John Stow (1525-1605) and the Making of the English Past (review)

This beautifully produced collection of essays on the life and work of the Elizabethan editor and antiquarian, John Stow, grew out of a conference held in 2001 at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The editors have assembled a range of inquiries by both leading senior scholars and young researchers at the start of their careers, and the papers move between highly technical accounts of books and printing to general narratives of history, biography, and culture. The portrait that emerges from this book is of a man situated at the very heart of Renaissance English literary society. The chapters by Ian Archer, Oliver Harris, Ian Gadd and Meraund Fergusson, and Alfred Hiatt locate Stow among the antiquarians, booksellers, and historians of the mid-sixteenth century. From Harris, in particular, the reader can learn much about the larger antiquarian sensibility at mid-century – a blend of humanist philology and local archaeological and archival obsession. From Alexandra Gillespie, Anthony Bale, Andrew Gordon, and Helen Moore, the reader learns much about the shifting techniques of historiography in Stow's age. Emerging from these discussions are such large questions as: What is a valid source? How can one truly be the author of a history? Where does one draw the line between incorporation and 'counterfeiting' of material? These questions help shape writing about the past, from the annals and chronicles of the late medieval world to the more modern-looking histories of the Renaissance.

I learned a great deal from this book about such matters. I learned less about Stow's role in English letters. A.S.G. Edwards and Derek Pearsall are largely content to rehearse approaches they have offered elsewhere, or simply to direct the reader to previous scholarship. Martha Driver offers an essay that will be of interest only to the most technically adept of bibliographers. Joseph Dane seeks to survey the nature of 'Stow's Chaucer,' the 1561 edition of Chaucer's works which survives in copies so different in detail, either due to editorial intention or printer's error, that professional bibliographers have a hard time deciding just what these copies represent – different editions, different issues, different artifacts. Emerging from the copious details of Dane's inquiry is, nonetheless, the characteristic sceptical tone that marks the best chapters of his earlier books, Who Is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb? and The Myth of Print Culture.

For me, the most distinctive and surprising essay in the volume is Bale's on the relationship of Stow's study of medieval history and attitudes towards Judaism in sixteenth-century England. This is an essay that should be of interest not simply to scholars of Anglo-Jewish history, but to those concerned with typography (the printing of Hebrew letters in English books deserves a chronicle of its own), the institutions of the English church, and the idea of historical narrative itself.

Each essay in this volume is quite short (the longest is no more than a dozen pages), and the authors may have more to say in later publications. I hope so, because many of them represent the best of a new generation of book historians. Perhaps, in that future work, they may be able to answer some long-standing questions of my own: what was Stow's role in the assembly of British Library Manuscript Harley 78 (a weird pastiche of fragments running from Wyatt's prose, through Chaucer's poetry, bits of alliterative verse, and pieces of history)? What was, in detail, Stow's relationship to John Shirley's manuscripts and how can we compare Stow and Shirley as collectors and filters of the Chaucerian inheritance? How can we assess Stow's overall relationship, not just to individual playwrights of his day, but to the idea of Elizabethan theatricality and, in turn, to the culture of political performance that has generated, in our own time, nearly thirty years of New Historicist criticism? It will be worth following the work of...