The Album Amicorum & the London of Shakespeare’s Time (review)

June Schlueter’s impressive and accessible The Album Amicorum & the London of Shakespeare’s Time is the first full-length study in English of the album amicorum, or the “friendship album” genre. The album tradition began in German universities in the mid-sixteenth century, and flourished among German-and Dutch-speaking travellers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Album owners would fill their alba with textual and graphic media, and circulate their volumes in order to collect friends’ and dignitaries’ signatures, dedications, coats of arms, drawings, and watercolor paintings. These albums served both as a public declaration of one’s social connections and personal taste, as well as a souvenir of one’s travels and acquaintances. Although predominantly a continental tradition, Schlueter limits her focus to albums with a connection to what she dubs “Shakespeare’s London”: the city between the 1580s (when Shakespeare arrived in London) and 1623 (the publication of the First Folio). Schlueter focuses on albums that belonged to Dutch and German visitors to London, as well as on continental albums with English contributors. In this way, Schlueter offers a tourist’s view of early modern London and explores Londoners’ interactions with their continental neighbors.

The monograph is divided into ten chapters. Chapter 1 presents an overview of the genre’s general features, including albums’ material attributes and the role the albums played in social exchange. Chapter 2 is devoted to Flemish soldier Michael van Meer’s 1614–1615 album, which documents his visit to London. Chapters 3 and 4 reconstruct early modern London through accounts and illustrations of London landmarks, institutions, costumes, and processionals as they are presented in various visitors’ albums. Chapters 5 and 6 investigate albums with royal connections, which, with their wide array of signatures from England and the Continent, reveal a complex network of royal and aristocratic relationships across Europe. Chapter 7 examines illustrations of early modern actors and musicians in performance, while chapters 8 and 9 explore some of the more peculiar paintings in alba amicorum. Finally, in chapter 10, Schlueter concludes with an examination of Francis Segar’s album, one of the few Englishmen to adopt the continental custom of album keeping. The monograph’s sixty-seven beautifully rendered illustrations display not only the signatures, coats of arms and portraits that were incorporated into albums, but also drawings and watercolors of landmarks and scenes of everyday life in early modern London. For example, an album painting of Elizabeth I’s Westminster Abbey tomb records features no longer extant, while illustrations of theatrical performances and travelling players provide perspective on contemporary dramatic practices. Throughout the work, Schlueter cites 187 examples from the 2,000 alba amicorum she examined over a seven year period in libraries and archives in continental Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. As is typical of material book histories composed of numerous case studies, the masses of data required to relate such examples do not always produce a readable narrative. However, the book is always highly informative, and Schlueter’s meticulous citations provide a valuable resource for researchers.

The Album Amicorum is most engaging when Schlueter moves from discussions of particular albums to the broader cultural implications of the genre. She reveals the albums’ importance to early modern friendship and self-fashioning, both of which were conducted in public. Album owners displayed their social connections by soliciting signatures and tributes from eminent dignitaries, aware that later contributors would read these tributes. As Schlueter explains, “[n]ot only did the album owner receive the praise of his contributors with satisfaction; so also was he pleased to have subsequent contributors read what earlier ones had written”(27). For their part, contributors gauged their status according to the albums’ previous contributors, and were conscious that subsequent ones would read their entries. Album owner and contributor alike displayed their personal taste and wealth by incorporating erudite textual and beautiful (and expensive) visual materials for albums, with owners and contributors each highly attentive to the public nature...