The four horsemen of the Apocalypse: religion, war, famine and death in Reformation Europe

who were born or aged under five during the late 1840s. But this book is not satisfied with just examining food and famine, for it goes on to study the issue of nutrition, rightly observing that the nutritional value of diets is a major determinant of health. Here again much attention is devoted to the potato. This time Clarkson and Crawford explore the controversial issue of the relationship between diet, marriage and population growth. Rejecting Connell's argument that the Irish pre-famine population explosion was to a large extent caused by early marriage, they instead highlight the role of the nutritionally-rich potato in guaranteeing health-and fertility, as well as laying the economic basis for near universal marriage. Finally, there is an interesting chapter surveying government efforts to regulate and control food supply. Irish historians have studied famine relief in some detail, but Clarkson and Crawford range far more widely than this, examining conflicting priorities: the government's desire to maximize tax revenue, on the one hand, as against its need, on the other, to avoid civil unrest by guaranteeing cheap, adequate and unadulterated food. Titled Feast andfamine, there is no doubt into which category this book falls: it offers a veritable feast for those interested in food, famine and disease in Ireland and elsewhere. Clearly we have here the definitive book on the subject of Irish food and nutrition. This fascinating book attempts to do what is too rarely done: to integrate the physical histories of life and death with the mental and spiritual worlds that gave meaning to such terminal events. Cunningham and Grell have set themselves the task of describing the frightening ways in which Europeans sickened and died in what they call Reformation Europe. During the decades between 1490 and 1650, roughly speaking, most of Europe coped with several new threats to daily life: new or fairly new diseases (syphilis, siege disease, the English Sweat, continuing outbursts of plague); newly destructive warfare on a new and larger scale; and new outbreaks of famine and starvation after the relatively abundant decades of the fifteenth century. Even the weather failed to cooperate, and Europe slid into what some have called a "Little Ice Age". Most Europeans believed that they were being attacked or chastised more severely and more lethally than ever before. And so they were understandably attracted to the notion that the reason for their current distress was the anger …