comptes rendus 217 east of the Habsburg dominions lay the states governed by Vladislaus IV Vasa in the early 1600s. Jacek Zukowski ofers an interesting and well-illustrated tour of triumphal entries into several cities in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by Vladislaus and his queen, Marie Louise Gonzaga. Te best chapters in this volume provide both an intellectual commen- tary on the festivities’ messages and a pragmatic discussion of how they were experienced. As many of these contributors have argued, readers should be aware of the patrons’ and organizers’ intentions, while also remaining attuned to the realistic experience of events that could be chaotic, misunderstood, un- derfunded, and unfnished, or a near copy of an event held forty years earlier. Nevertheless, this volume is sound evidence that the feld of European festival studies continues to make headway in a multi-disciplinary fashion. jennifer mara desilva Ball State University Oldenburg, Scott. Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Pp. 290. ISBN 978-1-4426-4719-0 (hardcover) $65. “Strangers,” or foreigners, are familiar early modern literary fgures of fun. Te butt of linguistic jokes and cultural stereotyping, they are set apart as not-English, identifed as diferent through accents, dress, and peculiar man- nerisms. Yet, as Scott Oldenburg illuminates in Alien Albion, these outsider characters are ofen as complexly human and as sympathetically drawn as the English-born-and-bred. In examining historical and literary perspectives on immigrants to sixteenth-century England, Oldenburg asks us to reconsider our critical assumptions about England and the English as inward-looking and xenophobic, defning themselves and their country always against the dis- comforting diference that surrounds them. Complicating concepts of national identity and nation-formation, he posits instead that we should consider the community as a primary source of identity and association, held together not by geographical boundaries but by shared religious and economic interests, and by the domestic bonds of co-habitation, service, and marriage. Although