Though typically seen as occasions of royal performance, Elizabethan progresses were also performative occasions for the cities and towns that were visited by the queen and her retinue. This essay will look closely at the entertainments created for the queen’s 1574 visit to Bristol. Although Bristol was the realm’s third largest city (by both population and wealth), its city and diocesan charters were recent (1542) and its city corporation had endured repeated challenges to its authority; the bishops of Bristol, the surrounding landed gentry, the Council of the Marches, and the Court of Admirality had all impinged on the corporation’s jurisdiction—usually under the pretense of stabilizing this potentially volatile region. I argue that these recent challenges helped determine the form and content of Bristol’s 1574 pageants. Though the purpose of these performances was ostensibly to entertain the queen, the city officials created distinctively martial pageants in order to highlight the military prowess of Bristol’s citizen militia and to underscore the city’s ability to prevent rebellion in the West. In doing so, these “shows” make a calculated argument for affirming the authority of the city corporation.

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This book is a varied and well-researched collection that both builds on and contributes to the recent scholarly turn toward local studies. While its nine essays share a focus on early modern Sussex, they explore an impressive array of cultural categories, including religion, politics, art, education, literature, hospitality, and intellectual networks. These essays are successful in offering exciting new readings of these areas because they combine traditional primary sources with "relatively neglected or unfamiliar documentary sources" (255) like paintings, tombs, book inscriptions, buildings, commonplace books, maps, and even gossip. The analysis of such sources is enhanced by the inclusion of over fifty images within the text. The introduction asserts that early modern Sussex was a complex place-"an unwieldy, complicated, and often obscure region" (2)and all of these essays make a virtue of embracing that complexity as they seek to reveal cultural tensions and fractures and discuss the careful negotiations that they necessitated. Given Sussex's diverse religious landscape, it is not surprising that a number of essays focus on religion. Paul Quinn examines the Marian executions of Richard Woodman and the nine other so-called Sussex Martyrs. Though later commemorators have attributed