seventeenth-century news C. F. Goodey. A History of Intelligence and "Intellectual Disability." The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe. UK / USA: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2011. 388pp. £35, $69.95. Review by maría g. navarro, spanish national research council (csic). A History of Intelligence and "Intellectual Disability" examines how the concepts of intellectual ability and disability became part of psychology, medicine and biology. Focusing on the period between the Protestant Reform and 1700, this book shows that in many cases it has been accepted without scientific and psychological foundations that intelligence and disability describe natural or trans-historical realities. The author, C.F. Goodey, has been investigating the history of "intellectual disability" for more than 20 years. He has developed his research while teaching at Ruskin College, Oxford, the Open University and the University of London among others. Goodey has a strong hypothesis with a clear theoretical potential. He makes his research following historical conditions, accepting temporal restrictions and analysing concepts from a semantic point of view (in different fields as for example the psychology, biology, medicine and even philosophy of the mentioned period). Consequence of this research is not only a critique of the presumptive natural signification of intelligence and disability but a new approach with educative, political, social and psychological implications. He demonstrates that the topic he presents to debate and public critical thinking is in truth related to the social origins of human self-representation. It is in this sense how we should understand the current debates on intelligence. Another important argument is that intellectual disability is a notion developed through dilemmas around predestination and free will in Protestant theology. However, it is important to not forget that this diagnostic is not equivalent to the author's claim to regard intelligence and intellectual disability as historical contingences. The book is well structured. Having in mind that the author has accepted certain historical reconstructions focusing his attention on the political, social, psychological and even medical and educative dimensions of the concepts he presents to analyse, we can say that the book is extremely serious in his general plan. Limitations and contradictions of a historical genealogy of "intelligence" and "disability" as reviews 21 natural or trans-historical realities will permit the author to test his hypothesis about the radical contingency of our dreams about human intelligence and the particular nightmare of this dream is its absence. Divided into eight parts, A History of Intelligence and "Intellectual Disability," has the subtitle The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe, the theoretical hypothesis and the historical framework are constituted by eighteen chapters in which the notion of disability is presented as part of socio-economic structures, medical histories, status and forms of power and even as phenomenon that implores a kind of ethics of exceptionality. This history of intelligence and "intellectual disability" shows in its passionate eighteen chapters that the very salient and notable history of human self-representation is also a history of exclusion and dishonour for testing the rule of human nature through classification and abnormality. Goodey presents in this work the notion of "intellectual disability" as a product of certain historical idiosyncrasies as the very important demand from a marketized bureaucracy that each of us answers to individually. To be more precise, the author affirms that "the microcosm-macrocosm picture of man's place in the universe, a central feature of medieval cosmology, has been transformed in the modern era into a picture where the horizontal axis of time replaces the vertical one of space, and a future godlike human intelligence replaces God himself as its point of aspiration" (39). But the gravity of this assertion is accompanied by long-term, cross-cultural elements: Goodey presents a complex map since the ancient Greeks to the history of intelligence and disability in European socio-economic structures, the important religious texts that present intelligence (also called "wit") as a self-referential mode of bidding status and conduct manuals in which it is clear how honour, grace as related to intelligence occupied a juxtaposed place with the corresponding concept of disability, etc. The definitions of these notions are important because they are part of the history of medicine: following this theoretical frame doctors have written descriptions of intellectual states and their relationship to the structure of body and brain. The last chapter describes the influence of this strong sixteenth and seventeenth discourse on the philosopher John Locke in his comments on "idiots" and "changelings." As we know the idiot was for Locke not a changeling as the idiot lacked the fundamentally human 22 seventeenth-century news capability to abstract. Goodey also analyses the influence of Locke's doctrine on the eighteenth-century theories of behaviour and modern educational practices: "Locke replaces an organic, behavioural and provisional model of foolishness with one that is disembodied, intellectual, and permanent" (326). Researchers and scholars interested in studying intelligence and lack of intelligence in periods before the twentieth century will find this book one of the most relevant works. But as intelligence is a peculiar idea maybe many researchers will continue asking why our modern understanding of "intellectual disability," a contingent and accidental notion, crystallised around 400 years ago and what that implies for us in our current century, not only in Western but in the whole world. I am sure it will continue to be contingent and accidental but in what sense and what kind of human beings are currently classified by these notions? Is also animal's intelligence part of the scenery about the lack of intelligence we should analyse? How does Goodey s thesis about the contingent and accidental definition of disability, intelligence and lack of intelligence affect our new and future conceptions of human self-representation and animal representation? Reading this book will give you some answers but it will also increase the number of questions. Jayne E. E. Boys. London's News Press and the Thirty Years War. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011. x + 338 pp. $99.00. Review by nicole greenspan, hampden-sydney college. With London's News Press and the Thirty Years War, Jayne Boys builds upon the growing interest of historians and literary scholars in international news. Through detailed examination of the periodical press between the 1620s and 1640s, and meticulous research into the areas of contemporary print, news, and political cultures, Boys seeks to demonstrate "the interplay between high domestic politics, international relations and London news publication" (2). The book is divided into three sections. The first broadly treats the development of print and news cultures in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Chapter 1 focuses on the popular interest in and market for