a scene from Racine’s Britannicus and is the first comedy in decasyllables. The genericterms do not fit, so Voltaire opts for the most general and, it turns out, modern term,‘une pièce de théâtre’ (p.86). Such is Voltaire’s desire to experiment with new genresthat he does not let his own professed opinions get in his way. Despite his scorn for thetheatre of the foire, his Fête de Bélesbat is effectively an opéra-comique. The rationale forexperimentation is often to respond critically to contemporary trends in theatre. Inanswer to Diderot’s proposition that the new theatre of Sensibility is worthy of thegreatest subjects such as the death of Socrates, Voltaire writes, not a Diderotiandomestic tragedy, but a comic depiction of religious and judicial corruption. Socrate isa play which explicitly outdoes Diderot’s theories on mixing genres, and implicitlycriticises the predictably earnest nature of Diderot’s drames.

To underestimate Voltaire’s critical awareness is to risk misinterpreting thecharacters in his comedies. Mme Barbe’s sulking in Le Compte de Boursoufle, forexample is a parodic display of emotion intended to satirise the theatre of Sensibility.A strength of this book, however, is not only that the author does justice to theintellectual dimension of Voltaire’s comic drama and his critical interests. The book isjust as concerned with why Voltaire is funny, why his comedies are comic, andGoulbourne manages to explain this without falling into the predictable trap ofentirely killing the jokes. One cannot, should not understand Voltaire withoutunderstanding his sense of humour, and happily one can through this book.

Edward NyeLincoln College, Oxford

Le Maître de poste et le messager: Les transports publics en France au temps deschevaux. Patrick Marchand. Paris: Editions Belin. 2006. 366 pp. €24. 2-7011-4259-8.

The postmaster would probably not immediately spring to mind as a key figure inthe social, political and economic history of France through the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries. Yet Marchand’s thoughtful book takes the reader on a journeythrough the history of France by the means of public transport or, more precisely, thepeople, institutions and services which, he argues, ran the country up until 1873

when the position of postmaster was finally disbanded due to the ever increasingdominance of the train as a means of transporting people and things.

The vagaries of Britain’s present-day rail network pale in comparison to thecomplexities of the three institutions which dominated public transport in ancienrégime France: the ‘poste aux chevaux’, ‘messageries’ and ‘poste aux lettres’.Although separate, these services fought hard to jealously protect their prerogativeswhile attempting to encroach into the activities of others. Through a meticulousexamination of case studies, Marchand carefully untangles the web of laws, rules andregulations which allowed the postmaster to thrive – even to the extent of becominga voice of government and a force for social stability in the provinces. This book’s greatstrength is that the author skilfully utilises legal documentation, case studies andarchival sources, spread throughout the various regions of France to make hisargument rather than relying solely on the often sensationalised and subjectivetravellers’ accounts, allowing him to present a nuanced picture of his subject matter.

Marchand’s book is divided into three parts: the first, ‘Messageries, coches etcarrosses’ moves from a chapter on the complexities of the transportation networkto the people involved (both service providers and customers). The second part

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examines the administration of the postal service and post offices, measures taken toincrease the speed and efficiency of the service and the working conditions of the‘courriers’ and the ‘entrepreneurs de dépêches’. The final part looks at the post horsenetwork, the role of the State and the job of the postmaster. The final chapter recountsthe fortunes of various individuals and families who served as postmasters in Paris.An epilogue traces the repercussions of the decline and fall of the post-horse networkat the end of the nineteenth century – victims of the changing times with the adventof the age of steam, the postmasters found themselves abandoned by the veryinstitution they had served and supported – the government. The study is rounded offwith an excellent and thorough bibliography, an appendix including notes on specificpostmasters and an extremely useful glossary of terms which underlines the subtletyand complexity of Marchand’s work. All in all, the author has ably grasped the nettleof deciphering the complex world of the transportation of mail and people ineighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and his book would be a valuableaddition to the social and economic history section of any university library.

John GreeneUniversity of Louisville

Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth-Century Mystic. Julie Hirst. Aldershot:Ashgate. 2005. 172 pp. £45 hb. 0-7546-5127-4.

Julie Hirst has written a thorough, considered and compelling account of Jane Leade,prophet, innovative theologian, leader of the Philadelphian Society and the mostprolific English woman writer of the late seventeenth century. Despite the obviousimportance of its subject matter, however, this biography of Leade appears to be agenuinely new project: Leade is ‘relatively unknown’ (p.1) in scholarship, through sheis currently championed by advocates of New Age mysticism, who represent her as aworshipper of the Goddess, and her entire oeuvre is available on the internet. In herown day, Leade’s brand of pietistic and gendered millennial universalism was morewidely received. Her books were published simultaneously in English, Dutch andGerman, and she had a devoted following throughout Europe and in early America.Nevertheless, Leade remains a minor figure in the recovered canon of writing byseventeenth-century radical women. Hirst argues that she is neither sufficientlyfeminist nor political for the preference of modern critics, and claims that theirvarious approaches would necessarily underplay the complexity and innovation ofLeade’s thought. This interdisciplinary biography therefore provides the kind ofcontextual and synoptic work that should – but all too frequently does not – precededetailed critical study.

The biography makes sense of some extremely challenging material. Hirst writeslucidly, if not always with theological precision. But Jane Leade is not entirely a historyof ideas. Hirst emphasises her subject’s debt to Sophia, whom Leade met in visionsbetween 1670 and 1704. These visions began shortly after the death of Leade’shusband and her entrance into the esoteric and socially elite community centred onthe household of John Pordage, her ‘spiritual mate’. Leade closely identified withSophia, pushing this emphasis on wisdom far beyond Behmenist boundaries. Hirstnotes that Sophia became ‘almost a personality’ to Leade (p.121), who represented herrelationship with ‘the eternal goddess’, as well as the relationship between Sophia andChrist, as a marriage. After Pordage’s death, Leade became the focus of the

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