James A. Knapp. 2003. Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books. Aldershot: Ashgate. xvi + 274 pp. ISBN 0-7546-3332-2. £35/$59.95.

1. Between the beginning of the sixteenth and the middle of the eighteenth century, English attitudes to the past were transformed in almost every respect. The shift applied not only to evolutions in historical method, but also to the scope, subject matter, and meaning of history, and the social identity of historians (from the monks and artisans of c. 1500 to the vicars and gentlemen of leisure of the eighteenth century). While much scholarship has been devoted to the changing methods and mindsets of historians and antiquarians in these centuries, certain equally fundamental questions have remained largely unexplored. How was the past experienced by early modern subjects? How did the English feel about their history (if, indeed, they felt it to be theirs), and how did they feel it in the world around them? What were the uses of the past, not on the grand levels of moral teaching or nation-building, but in daily life? The studies of Daniel Woolf and James Knapp both seek, in very different ways, to tackle these complex questions.

2. Where is the past to be sought? How can it be touched or felt? Few early modern historians address these questions as earnestly or from as many angles as Shakespeare does in Henry V. Early in the play, the king's advisers suggest two sites where one might go in search of the past. The first, somewhat pessimistically, is the inaccessible ocean bed: Henry is encouraged to make the English chronicle 'as rich with praise/ As is the ooze and bottom of the sea with sunken wreck and sumless treasures'. The second site, more promisingly, is one's own body:

   Awake remembrance of these valiant dead,
   And with your puissant arm renew their feats.
   You are their heir, you sit upon their throne,
   The blood and courage that renowned them
   Runs in your veins

   These lines are addressed to a king, and they deal with the question of how a king can locate his place in history. Yet both models of relation between the past and the present find remarkable resonance in the daily life of the period. Sixteenth-century Cornish fishermen periodically drew up 'peeces of doores and windowes' from the ooze and bottom off Land's End, evidence of former habitation of lands now under the waves. And fascination with ancestors was ceasing to be confined to the nobility, or even the gentry. Robert Furse, a yeoman of Devon, began in 1593 a history of his family, 'spessyally those that have bynne wythyn this seven score yeres', as a reminder to his own heirs of 'what you ofte to have and what you ofte to do'.

3. Woolf's book, in which the reader will encounter Furse and the Cornish fishermen, offers up an almost inexhaustible trove of early modern antiquarians, collectors, heralds, genealogists, village story-tellers, memorious aunts and other professional and amateur explorers of past times. His subject is not history as an evolving discipline, but something much broader, 'historical culture': 'the perceptual and cognitive web of relations between past, present, and future'. The book's chronological scope includes all of early modernity, more or less, and many of the chapters demonstrate how over the decades and centuries English ways of relating to the past were changing on the ground, as well as in the historian's study. When the College of Heralds conducted its provincial visitations in the 1560s, pretenders to gentility shook in their boots; for the visitations of the 1660s and 70s, few gentry even bothered to turn up. In the sixteenth century, oral traditions about the past were an important source of historical information; by the beginning of the eighteenth century, they were more likely to be regarded as themselves a subject of historical study.

4. Yet while Woolf shows how things changed between 1500 and 1730, he is determined not to make his study an account of how 'they' became more like 'us'. His concern is with the shifting meanings and uses of the past in the period itself. The introduction is an admirable manifesto for a broad approach to early modern historical culture, embracing both elite and popular perceptions and activations of the past. If the volume has its shortcomings, they mostly result from the failure in some places to follow through on this programme. The usual suspects – gentleman antiquarians – still loom a little too large in the narrative. Woolf seems more comfortable considering how elite historical practitioners responded to or appropriated popular versions of the past than with tackling the popular on its own terms. (Admittedly, given the nature of the evidence, it would be difficult to do so without some relaxation of academic rigour.) Such lapses can probably be put down to the fact that the book is compiled in large part out of previously published articles, some dating back as much as 15 years. Woolf's understanding of historical culture has developed considerably over this period; if the Introduction represents his most recent position, his future work in this field is to be eagerly awaited.

5. Although Woolf does not dwell at length on the causes of the shifts he charts, it is evident in many chapters that he is registering the short-, medium-, and long-term consequences of the English Reformation. The Reformation set in motion massive shifts in English historical culture in at least three distinct ways. Firstly, the traumatic break with the customary life of the past provoked both an appreciation of historical periodization and a burgeoning of nostalgia, perhaps especially in response to the ruins of the monasteries. Secondly, the abolition of Purgatory and prayer for the dead severed traditional bonds between the dead and the living, forcing the English to imagine new forms of relationships with their departed ancestors. Thirdly, the suspicion in which Protestantism held visual images led to anxieties about how the past should be represented and experienced, and about what aspects of it should be preserved – the dusty antiquities that now filled collectors' cabinets could be seen as disturbingly (or comfortingly) akin to the relics of saints.

6. This last facet of the Reformation is the central theme of Knapp's book, a much more narrowly focused study than Woolf's. Indeed, Knapp's subject, the depiction of history in printed books in the Elizabethan period, is one to which Woolf devotes no more than half a dozen sentences. As both writers note, the tradition of narrative historical painting, a major genre in Italy, never developed in early modern England. Even the representation of the past in book illustrations died out almost entirely in England after 1580. The 1577 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles was adorned with an array of well-known and intriguing woodcuts. The much expanded edition of the Chronicles published in 1587 had no woodcuts.

7. As Patrick Collinson has argued, 1580 marked a shift in English Protestant attitudes to the visual, from an initial uneasy utilitarianism (using the enemy's weapons against the enemy) to outright iconophobia. The apparently total disappearance of historical illustrations from English books after about this date is just one, particularly pronounced, example of the general trend. Knapp does not take issue with Collinson's thesis. Indeed, he defines the pictorial tradition evidenced in Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563, 1570), Holinshed's Chronicles (1577), and Derricke's Image of Ireland (1581) as 'residual' – residual, but not archaic. The force of this distinction, taken from Raymond Williams, is that while visual thinking may have ceased to make sense within the terms of the dominant ideology, it continued to speak on a deep level to the sensibilities of Elizabethan readers.

8. Scholars sometimes like to comfort themselves with the notion that any tradition which we know in hindsight to have been on the verge of extinction (the theatre in 1640, monasticism in 1535) was probably dead on its feet anyway – decadent, stagnant, trapped in the mechanical repetition of outmoded forms. This, Knapp argues with great success, was decidedly not the case with historical book illustration in the 1560s and 70s. The makers of these books did not forget their hard-won Protestantism and succumb to mere habit whenever they inserted a woodcut. Rather, the images in Foxe, Holinshed and Derricke are designed to appeal to readers in culturally relevant and carefully defined ways.

9. Thus, in the 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments, the large majority of woodcuts are 'narrative' images – depictions of specific martyrdoms in which the various actions represented are not contemporaneous with each other. Through the process of actively 'reading' these woodcuts, the viewer is distanced from the threat of lapsing into idolatry. The 1570 edition, on the other hand, contains many more of the smaller, 'generic' woodcuts which could be used over and over to represent many different martyrs. These seem dangerously close to icons but, Knapp argues, they are rather to be understood as types, participating, moreover, in a 'typology of . . . the mundane'. Through identification with these types, the average reader begins to apprehend his or her membership in a historical Protestant community.

10. Knapp makes similarly deft points about the illustrations in Holinshed and The Image of Ireland. For early modernists, who will be familiar with many of these images and used to hearing them discussed in terms of their ideological strategies, the revelation of Illustrating the Past lies in the complex relationships it charts between the illustrated books and their readers/ viewers. Yet, if I have a concern about Knapp's approach, it has to do with the very familiarity of these images. Cuts from Foxe, Holinshed, and Derricke already adorn the pages and covers of any number of recent monographs (as publishers abandon four-colour covers, academic authors are returning to these three wells with increasing regularity.) Is this really it? Are there no other examples of historical illustration from English printed books (or broadsheet ballads) before 1581, or after? (An exception that springs to mind is the woodcut of landing Saxons from Verstegan's Restitution of Decayed Intelligence [1603], which adorns the cover of Woolf's book – though this book, of course, has a Catholic author.)

11. The focus of Knapp's book will inevitably strike some readers as overly narrow, just as Woolf's will seem to others overly broad. Yet, in their different ways, both books contribute valuably to what may be emerging as a new topic in early modern studies: the question of how people experienced their history. For individuals who find themselves drawn to the past, its importance cannot be circumscribed in terms of what history teaches or how it may be employed – deeper than these lies the desire to go there, to touch the past and share presence with the dead. This desire was no less profound in the early modern period than it is for many of us today. As Meric Casaubon observed in the 1630s:

    Antiquaries are so taken with the sight of old things . . . because those visible superviving evidence of antiquities represent unto their minds former times, with as strong an impression, as if they were actually present, and in sight as it were: even as old men look gladly upon those things, that they were wont to see, or have been otherwise used unto in their younger yeares, as injoying those yeares again in some sort, in those visible and palpable remembrances.