“The events that ultimately led to war were erratic and unexpected” (175), concludes one contributor to this collective volume on Anglo-French diplomatic relations. His comment refers only to the chain of events leading to the War of the Spanish Succession, but it also expresses the theme that unites the book. During the early modern period, most of the contributors agree, relations between British and French states were closer and warmer than historians have usually thought. To be sure, closeness and warmth often ended in warfare, but there was nothing inevitable about that outcome. It resulted from unforeseeable events and complicated personalities, rather than from an enduring divergence of national interests. Violent conflict merely interrupted more positive, more enduring, forms of engagement. Such a conclusion accords nicely with the collection's occasion, a 2004 conference that honored the centenary of the Entente Cordiale between the two countries, by examining their relationship over the early modern period. Seven papers examine specific moments in that relationship, ranging from the Hundred Years' War to 1700; two others examine the social history behind these diplomatic encounters, by comparing the two countries’ aristocracy and prelates; and the editor supplies a thoughtful overview of the issues at stake.

Each paper offers impressive scholarship, with implications that extend well beyond the history of international relations. (The book's copy editing is less impressive; typographical errors abound, some of them bizarre.) Thus, two papers show the important and multilayered role that women played in early modern diplomacy. Susan Doran follows the close relationship that developed between Elizabeth I and the French Queen Mother Catherine de Medici; despite differences in age, style, and religion, the two shared common goals and worked effectively together. Sonja Kmec explores the role that private subjects played in Anglo-French relations, by tracing the career of Charlotte de La Trémoille, daughter of a French duke and wife of an English earl. The example throws light on women's options in the seventeenth-century world but also on the complex, supranational strategies that aristocratic families developed to cope with that world.

The other papers focus on the great men who have traditionally dominated the study of international relations, but these papers also go well beyond conventional understandings of diplomatic history. Charles Giry-Deloison, for instance, follows the close cultural relationships that developed between English and French courts in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Glenn Richardson shows the eagerness of François I to ease Henry VIII's marital and religious troubles; in the late 1520s and early 1530s, realistic politicians could sincerely hope that Henry might achieve something akin to François's own concordat with the papacy, and François did his best to secure that result. Cardinal Richelieu (so Loïc Bienassis shows) also worked hard to achieve a common front with England, as France approached full involvement in the Thirty Years' War. For all these figures, the papers show, the Habsburg empires represented the real enemy; alliance against its overwhelming power was the natural diplomatic stance for both English and French kings and for those who advised them.

Only the two social-historical papers that the book includes suggest a somewhat different story, in which fundamental differences play a larger role. Robert Knecht's paper compares English and French nobilities, focusing mainly on the sixteenth century. Early modern English nobles (he shows) had lost the habit of fighting, and they paid a heavy share of their kingdom's taxes. In contrast, the French nobility remained warlike throughout the early modern period, and they enjoyed relative freedom from royal control and royal taxation; when French nobles went to war, they did so using other people's money. A peace party of country gentlemen, indignant at having to pay for their king's European ambitions, made sense in the English context but was almost inconceivable in France. Perhaps Louis XIV's failure to understand the English political scene, whose dire consequences David Onnekink's paper so carefully traces, reflected deep societal differences as well as momentary miscalculation.

Cédric Michon's splendid comparison of “state prelates” in England and France suggests similar reflections. Bishops and other church leaders played a considerable role in both governments, but to different effect. French bishops were drawn almost exclusively from the high aristocracy, and they shared its values and attitudes; the church thus constituted yet another avenue by which aristocratic values permeated French political life. English bishops were nearly all social upstarts, shaped by the universities they had attended rather than by the clans into which they had been born, and they tended to counteract the aristocracy's political influence. In this respect as well, the English political nation thus differed profoundly from the French. Conflict between them may have startled contemporaries, but there remain reasons for the historian to be less surprised.

Drawing together contributors from England, France, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg, this collection exemplifies the intense exchanges now taking place among scholars across Europe; all the papers show a command of transnational history that was almost unheard of a generation ago. Their experiences in the new Europe, it seems, have given contemporary scholars a new sympathy for the early modern period—a time like our own of weak national boundaries and powerful movements across them, some of them constructive, some of them violent.