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Reviewed by:
  • Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England by Gesa Stedman
  • Paul Hammond
Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England. By Gesa Stedman. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. xii + 294 pp., ill.

The scope of this book is rather narrower than its title suggests, for it focuses exclusively on the reception of French culture in seventeenth-century England and says nothing about English influences on French society during this period. ‘Exchange’ is therefore a misleading term. The book begins with a theoretical introduction on how to understand cultural exchange, which some readers may find laborious as it works through various theoretical approaches that mostly seem to state the obvious. Thereafter the first chapter discusses the arrival of Henrietta Maria as the queen consort of Charles I and the ways in which her English subjects perceived her tastes and religion. The three remaining chapters are all concerned with the Restoration period and discuss fashion (mostly in relation to clothes, but also attending to cookery and garden design), social and sexual behaviour, and how French style and mores are represented in the English drama. This leaves a gap for the 1640s and 1650s, when many English exiles spent time in France and returned at the Restoration with a taste for French style and thought. Gesa Stedman has read widely and uses many well-chosen quotations from archival and printed sources, along with a generous selection of helpful illustrations; however, specialists in the period’s drama, poetry, costume, and music are unlikely to find much that is new or surprising, and the plot summaries of plays are sometimes excessive. Scholars will also wonder why Stedman quotes literary texts from student anthologies and odd corners of the Internet instead of using proper critical editions: the discussions of Dryden, for example, would have been enhanced if the author had consulted the California edition of his works, with its substantial analyses of the French influence on Restoration drama and literary criticism; and the account of George Etherege’s The Man of Mode could usefully have drawn on John Barnard’s analysis of its French elements in his edition of that play. This book is primarily a history of things, and students of the history of ideas will be disappointed, as there is no attention to the concepts and values explored in seventeenth-century French philosophy, literary criticism, or drama: there is no mention, for example, of Descartes, Racine, or Boileau and their English translators or imitators, so we are not led into an understanding of the ideas that united or separated these two societies. That said, however, many readers will find much to interest and to amuse them in the materials that Stedman quotes.

Paul Hammond
University of Leeds
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