Robert Cotton Research Articles

A Reassessment of the Military Careers and Writings of Sir John Peyton (1579–1635) and Sir Henry Peyton (c.1580–1623)

AbstractThis research note shines new light on previously misinterpreted and incorrectly catalogued key information about the role‐holder of the Lieutenant‐Governor of Brill in 1612. It identifies that a source for this information previously attributed to Sir John Peyton (1579–1635) was actually written by Sir Henry Peyton (c.1580–1623) and discusses the significance and impact of the newly discovered identification. It reveals Henry Peyton to be a prolific letter writer and collector of military maps and shows how he shared his research with Sir Robert Cotton. It also identifies that further research is needed into the military career of Henry Peyton and the significant role he played in early modern military history, with particular attention to be given to his martial reports from Venice and the Low Countries.

Tacit Narratives in the Manuscript Collections of Matthew Parker and Robert Cotton

Over the past two decades, the history of early modern archives has been a topic of considerable interest among historians, and their research has drawn attention to the complex motives and commitments that inspired individuals, communities, and institutions to create, collect, preserve, and use archives in the early modern period. Their research also offers insights into what Eric Ketelaar has called the “tacit narratives of power and knowledge” woven into the formation, preservation, and use of archives and opens up new avenues for exploring the social history of archives. The English Protestant Reformation has provided the backdrop for some of this work, highlighting the ways in which post-Reformation libraries functioned as “polemical weapons” in political and religious struggles to control the historical narrative about the roots of the Reformation. The libraries built by the antiquarian collectors Matthew Parker and Robert Cotton in the 16th and 17th centuries furnish useful examples of the kinds of tacit narratives embedded in the selection, preservation, and use of post-Reformation manuscript collections. This article draws on the research undertaken by early modern historians into the collecting and compiling practices underpinning the formation and use of the Parker and Cotton manuscript collections to demonstrate how their work is helping to illuminate the tacit narratives embedded in early modern archives as well as broadening and deepening the social history of archives.

Medieval Devotion in a Midwest Collection: Establishing Production and Provenance

Abstract: Without provenance or place of production, isolated manuscripts and orphaned leaves dot library and museum collections around the world. The College of Wooster houses an exquisite and complete book of hours of Sarum use about which almost nothing is known. Using formal analysis and the most limited of documentary sources, this essay proposes London, ca. 1430–1450, as the place of production for this little illuminated codex. Firmly linking this horae to known and researched prayer books such as the British Library's Burney MS 334, Harley MS 210, and especially the Harley MS 2887—also known as the Hours of the Earls of Ormond—this article provides an inlet to existing historiography on the codex's milieu of production. Moreover, this analysis supports the probability that this book survived the notorious fire in Sir Robert Cotton's library at Ashburnham House, with telltale signs of water and smoke damage apparent on the parchment pages. A previously overlooked and unresearched horae , the Wooster Hours now has a provenance and historiography.

Piozzi and Wales

Piozzi and Wales

Sir Robert Cotton, Manuscript Pamphleteering, and the Making of Jacobean Kingship during the Short Peace, ca. 1609–1613

AbstractThis article concerns two manuscript tracts by Sir Robert Cotton, the Answer to Certain Military Men regarding Foreign War (1609) and Twenty-Four Arguments on the Strict Execution of the Laws against Seminary Priests (1613). To the limited extent that these tracts have been studied at all, historians have read them as artifacts of the Jacobean regime's internal counseling process. Through analysis of the both the structure of the Jacobean regime's knowledge economy and the two tracts and contextualizing them, the author argues that these were, instead, innovative exercises in publicity, designed to defend existing Jacobean policy against so-called country criticism. Designed to circulate widely among the kingdom's social elite—indeed, more than two dozen handwritten copies of each tract survive—the manuscript pamphlets played on Cotton's reputation as an antiquary to legitimize the Jacobean regime's most controversial policies. More broadly, the tracts demonstrate the dilemma of a Jacobean regime caught between the geopolitics of peace and interconfessional diplomacy and the expectations of a domestic political elite nurtured on the values and expectations of confessional war.

"The Best Book of Romance": The Gawain Manuscript and Composite Miscellaneity

abstract: British Library MS Cotton Nero A.x contains the unique copies of four important alliterative Middle English poems including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight —the chief source of the book's fame and focus of scholarly attention over the last century. At one point, this composite codex also contained two Latin manuscripts, compiled with the Middle English poems by early modern antiquarian collector Sir Robert Cotton. More than three centuries after Cotton assembled the volume, however, the British Museum extracted the Latin material and bound it separately from Gawain and the other English poems. This essay discusses the unique form of codicological miscellaneity that characterizes composite manuscripts like Nero A.x. The story of its early modern assembly and modern disaggregation illustrates how material histories can determine how we access and interpret medieval texts today.

Norman Charters from English Sources: Antiquaries, Archives and the Rediscovery of the Anglo-Norman Past, by Nicholas Vincent

This book by Nicholas Vincent comprises an edition of an illustrative selection of material relating to Normandy to be found in English archives and, just as important, an explanation of how that material came to reside in England (and elsewhere, for that matter). In a lengthy introduction, comprising four essays in archival history, readers will thus find the ‘fascinating, but to date neglected story of the earliest antiquaries, both English and French, whose exploration of Norman archives helps to explain why so many Anglo-Norman antiquities are today to be found in England rather than France’ (p. 1). The edition itself comprises the texts of some 121 acts. The last forty-five of them (only ten of which have up till now been printed in full) relate to the French properties and rights of Canterbury cathedral priory, and in particular to its claims to wine from vineyards around Poissy and its exemptions from tolls and customs along the Seine. They are introduced in the fourth essay of the Introduction, where Vincent notes: ‘All told, our evidences are of very great significance for the final years of Plantagenet rule in Normandy, and supply a keen insight into relations between England and the lords of the Norman frontier’ (p. 99), although that relationship seems principally to have been personal and religious, for, ‘through their generosity to Canterbury, the French aristocracy was not necessarily demonstrating an attachment to England so much as approval of a saint, Thomas Becket, whose entire career could be read as a condemnation of the tyranny of the Plantagenet kings’ (p. 99). The final part of the essay explains why so many of these acts are no longer found at Canterbury but at other archives, notably the British Library. Here the finger is pointed squarely at Sir Edward Dering, who plundered the Canterbury archives during the seventeenth century, and whose ill-gotten gains were later passed to the likes of Thomas Astle and Robert Cotton, and thus, by various routes, to their present homes.

Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display. By Peggy Levitt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. x+244. $29.95.

<i>Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display</i>. By Peggy Levitt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. Pp. x+244. $29.95.

Of Beowulf : A Commentary, and A Few More Leaves of Tolkien’s Tree

Of BeowulfA Commentary, and A Few More Leaves of Tolkien’s Tree Marc Hudson (bio) J. R. R. Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with Sellic Spell, edited by Christopher Tolkien. Mariner Books, 2015. $15.95 pb. The original Beowulf manuscript is part of a curious assemblage: the Nowell Codex—some 110 leaves of ink on vellum copied and compiled in the eleventh century. This codex later came into the possession of the seventeenth-century antiquarian, Robert Cotton, and almost perished in the fire at the Ashburnam House in 1731. Bound in the Nowell Codex with Beowulf were three Old English works of prose and another of poetry, the poetic fragment “Judith.” Anglo Saxon scholars agree that these works share a common element—they are all wonder tales and give report of marvelous creatures, anthropophagi, dragons, giants, and a sword-wielding woman. It is not unlikely that our great Old English epic found its way to future readers through both the vagaries of chance and the appetite of monks for fabulous narratives. The tome currently under review, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary, has a cover bearing “J. R. R. Tolkien” in notably larger font than the gilt lettering of Beowulf. Below those famous names are the coils of a rather droll and decorative dragon drawn by the translator himself. This book is also a curious assemblage. Its principal treasure, one might assume, would be Tolkien’s translation of the wonder tale of Beowulf itself, but it also contains two other wonder tales: products of Tolkien’s imaginative collaboration with Beowulf: “Sellic Spell” and “The Lay of Beowulf.” The bulk of the volume, however, is comprised not of these greater and lesser wonder tales but of the scholarly commentary, over two hundred pages of it, written by Tolkien and selected from a much larger body of work by the book’s editor and the author’s son, Christopher Tolkien. The younger Tolkien has provided his own share of commentary and scholarly apparatus about his father’s translations, commentary, and creative work. As a translator of Beowulf and a longtime student of the poem and its translations, I was excited to learn of the publication of Tolkien’s translation. Perhaps this would be the Arkenstone of all translations of the poem, [End Page 157] the great version that some believed they had encountered with the 1999 publication of Seamus Heaney’s version. J. R. R. Tolkien, the Oxford professor of Anglo Saxon and master storyteller, had the imagination, the poetic mastery, and the linguistic and literary scholarship to achieve an exemplary translation. Even though I was aware that he had written his translation in prose, which tempered my excitement, I was still eager to get my hands on the book. My expectation had also been whetted by my admiration for the alliterative verses of Tolkien’s verse play, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son” (1953), a sort of coda to the famous Anglo Saxon poem “The Battle of Maldon.” In this work Tolkien handles his four-beat alliterative line well and writes in an almost contemporary idiom, inflected by the occasional archaic word. My expectation was that his prose translation would have some of the rhythmic energy and idiomatic sprezzatura of that work. I was to be disappointed. In truth, Tolkien’s translation is a faithful and scholarly reading of the poem. It has dignity, if not grace, and passages of some beauty. Tolkien writes his translation in a diction of high register, mindful of his notion that, “If you wish to translate, not rewrite Beowulf, your language must be literary and traditional, not because it is now a long while since the poem was made, or because it speaks of things that have since become ancient, but because the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day that the poem was made.” So the dignity of the poem demands a similar decorum of its translators. In that same introduction to a prose translation of Beowulf in which the above passage occurs, Tolkien also wrote that “the proper use of a prose translation is to provide an aide to study.” It is “a companion...

The Oldest Datings of the Utrecht Psalter

In the 1620s two attempts were made to date the Utrecht Psalter (c.830, in or around Reims): by its owner Robert Cotton and by the theologian James Ussher. Their results offer an insight into how a collector and a scholar practised palaeography before this became a modern study in the decades around 1700. The Utrecht Psalter, as well as the Cotton Genesis and other manuscripts, were dated in relation to their script, decoration and content. This case study underlines that the history of palaeography and codicology before Mabillon and Montfaucon is worth studying, not only in its own right, but also with regard to the development of humanism and its scholarly networks.

Theatre of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England, by Chris R. Kyle

This is an important addition to our knowledge and understanding of early modern parliaments. The author, Chris Kyle, entitles it austerely as ‘early Stuart’, but in truth he ranges freely backwards across the sixteenth century and a little more constrainedly forwards. It is a book about communication and it has a thoroughly modern agenda, examining language and non-verbal communication; print and manuscript, including the physicality of the texts discussed; and both physical spaces and mental worlds. But it has a thoroughly traditional approach to researching these subjects: no reliance here on EEBO and online databases. The bibliography takes up more than ten per cent of the book, and lists manuscripts in thirty-six repositories. Kyle has got his hands dirty in some very remote archives. The book is in three parts: ‘inside the chamber’, ‘writing parliament’ (how much more of-the-moment can you be than with such a title?) and ‘permeable boundaries’—this third part being the longest. The opening chapters are illuminating on the de-emphasis on rhetoric (except for set-piece events such as the Speakers’ ‘disabling speeches’) and the emphasis on logic. But it is much more startling and illuminating on the ‘noise’ of politics—silence as a weapon and device, hissing, laughter, even timely farting (which is, however, and emphatically I suppose, a rhetorical not a logical gesture). The second part is perhaps the most familiar, except that it explores in depth the world of quills and ink, writing boxes and reading desks, the invention of the pencil, and the non-use of shorthand. Here Kyle could have interrogated more thoroughly the forms of note-taking: some diarists clearly set out to summarise what they heard; others to note only things they found useful or offensive or simply striking; others clearly integrated what they heard with the thoughts triggered in them. But Kyle’s major point is that something very interesting was happening by the 1620s, that note-taking was no longer a private act, pour mémoire, but was increasingly a public act linked to letting others know what had happened and why. Kyle’s section on the dissemination of information about what was said in debate is especially wide-ranging and nuanced. Thus he has impressive evidence of what a Cambridge don got to know in order to tell gentry in East Anglia what was happening in Parliament; and he has one example of what MPs were willing to pay for printed separates hot from the press (premium rates: 4 shillings and 6 pence for the Lord Keeper’s speech in 1628; 2 shillings for quite a short speech by Sir Robert Cotton).

Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern EnglandMemory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

<i>Jennifer Summit</i>, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England<i>Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England</i>. Jennifer Summit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. x+343.

Highlights in this issue

Premature birth is frequent in infants conceived with assisted reproductive technologies (ART). When Jean-Charles Picaud et al. compared the outcome of ART preterm infants with that of spontaneously conceived (SC) preterms, they found that morbidity was significantly less in the ART group. The difference was mainly observed among the more immature infants (≤28 weeks), (pp. 846–851). Loop diuretics, such as furosemide, are among the most widely used medications in Newborn Intensive Care units. In addition to enhancing urine output, the loop diuretics have a variety of extra-renal effects that are described in this review article. Some effects, for example, on the brain may be good but more care should be taken with the use of these agents. As stated by Robert Cotton et al., the range of their effects may be much broader than the single action sought by the prescribing physician (pp. 835–845). Adolescent girls who feel that their puberty was early are more likely to have an early sexual debut, even if their puberty objectively was on time. They are also more likely to use illegal drugs. Conversely, girls perceiving their puberty as late are less likely to have intercourse before age 16. This was revealed in a Swiss survey including 1003 girls 16–20 years old, who all had their actual menarche at the age of thirteen (on-time age). Alain Deppen et al. (pp. 868–872). Whether Omega-3 fatty acid should be extra supplemented or not in the treatment of eating disorders and weight loss has been studied by Ingemar Swenne and Agneta Rosling. They followed 24 adolescent girls with eating disorders, before and after nutritional rehabilitation. Alterations of essential fatty acid status observed at baseline were normalized after treatment with standard diet. Although recovery coincided with improvement of Omega-3 status, there was no need for Omega-3 supplementation (pp. 858–861). Also see commentary by David Forbes and Howard Parsons (pp. 808–810). Retinopathy of prematurity (ROP) is a major cause of visual impairment and blindness in children. On page pp, Jean-Sébastien Joyal et al. describe the role of retinal neuron-derived factors in the development of ROP (pp. 819–826). The anti-vascular endothelial growth factor bevacizumab is an increasingly popular treatment for ROP. But the use of this cancer drug in neonates is widely debated. In Acta Paediatrica Perspectives, we asked Ann Hellström, professor in paediatric ophthalmology, and Christoph Bührer, professor in neonatology, to share their views about intravitreal bevacizumab (pp. 796–798).

Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England by Jennifer Summit (review)

Reviewed by: Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England by Jennifer Summit Toby Burrows Summit, Jennifer , Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008; cloth; pp. x, 343; 8 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. US$35.00; ISBN 9780226781716. The Act against Superstitious Books and Images (1550) ordered the public destruction of all medieval service books that had survived the dissolution of the English monasteries during the previous decade. Though a majority of medieval manuscripts were indeed destroyed, some still managed to survive into the post-Reformation period. Jennifer Summit is interested in the fate of these medieval books in early modern England, seen especially in the context of the history of libraries. She focuses on the period between 1431 and 1631, stretching from the collecting activities of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, to the equally influential work of Sir Robert Cotton. Disclaiming 'a general history of libraries' as her goal, she proceeds through close readings of texts written by a number of important figures of this period: John Lydgate, Thomas More, Thomas Starkey, Thomas Elyot, [End Page 312] Matthew Parker, Edmund Spenser, Robert Cotton, William Camden, John Weever, Francis Bacon, and Thomas James. These readings draw out the authors' views about the medieval past, the nature of libraries, the organization of knowledge, and much more. The result is a rich and sophisticated study that deals with a wide range of topics and ideas. It is exhaustively documented, with the notes making up more than a quarter of the text. This is a challenging book, which addresses a number of significant questions. Ultimately, though, the results are unsatisfactory, in several important ways. To start with the title: though the book begins and ends with the statement that 'memory is a library', and the 'Coda' contains some brief allusions to concepts of memory in cognitive science and computer science, the substance of the book is not really about memory. Where the concept of 'memory' does occur, it is used loosely to refer to a whole series of different types of 'remembering'. 'Memory as a library' tends to be used interchangeably with 'library as memory' - whereas, in reality, they are two very different things that ought to be carefully distinguished. In her Introduction, Summit draws a contrast between monastic libraries which upheld the authority of the Church of Rome and the major post-Reformation libraries which became 'centers of national memory' (p. 3). This is a surprisingly simplistic statement from an author who, on several occasions, emphasizes her commitment to a more 'nuanced' view of the relationship between the pre- and post-Reformation eras. It begs a whole series of questions about the nature and purposes of medieval libraries, let alone the nature of 'national memory' and the role of libraries in the modern world. At the very least, the statement needs to be explained and discussed more fully. Summit's assumptions about the nature and history of libraries tend to be over-simplified in other ways too. Medieval libraries and monastic libraries are referred to as if they were one and the same - even though cathedral, college, and school libraries (and even personal libraries) are referred to several times in passing. The extent and contents of post-Reformation libraries are never fully discussed, and the fact that they contained many more printed books than medieval manuscripts is largely glossed over. But this has significant implications for the survival of 'medieval books'. How did the manuscripts fit into the larger context of the post-Reformation library as a whole? Should the survival of medieval manuscripts be distinguished from the survival of medieval texts in printed form? Libraries were only one aspect of the various collecting activities of men like Cotton, as Summit acknowledges. How did their collections of 'curiosities' affect their approach to medieval manuscripts and their understanding of the meaning and significance of those manuscripts? [End Page 313] The methodology adopted for this book produces a series of admirably close and sensitive readings of specific texts. But this is achieved at some cost to the coherence of the overall argument. The themes in More's Utopia, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Camden...

The Pilsgate Manor of the Sacrist of Peterborough Abbey, ed. and tr. Margaret E. Briston and Timothy M. Halliday

This volume is the latest in a series of medieval Peterborough abbey manuscripts that have been edited for the Northamptonshire Record Society, of which the best known is C.N.L. Brooke and M.M. Postan's edition of the Carte Nativorum (1960; rev. ante, lxxvii [1962], 323–6). The present volume similarly includes a large collection of charters, some of them describing the transfer of land between the abbey's unfree tenants, which was the distinguishing and highly unusual characteristic of Brooke and Postan's edition. The Pilsgate register, however, is largely conventional, and similar to many other medieval cartularies which record the acquisition and exploitation of property by religious houses. Compiled in the early fifteenth century for George Fraunceys, sacrist of Peterborough abbey, the manuscript was acquired after the Dissolution by Sir Robert Cotton and is now kept at the British Library (Cotton MS Faustina B.iii). The focus of the sacrist's endowment was the manor of Pilsgate in Barnack parish, on the edge of the Northamptonshire fens, about 2½ miles south-east of Stamford and 9 miles north-west of Peterborough. Pilsgate had belonged to the abbey since pre-Conquest times and was appropriated to the office of sacrist in the mid-twelfth century. The register includes copies of nearly 300 charters, most dating from the thirteenth century, which describe the transfer of property in Pilsgate and several neighbouring villages. The charters reveal a predominantly open-field landscape in which tenants held arable strips interspersed with those of their neighbours. Numerous roads and tracks crossed the fields, many having names ending in ‘gate’, an Old Norse word for street. Also scattered across the landscape were several windmills, watercourses, and standing crosses, and the ragstone quarries for which medieval Barnack was renowned.

Migrations of Manuscripts 2010

1511. ‘The Etimologie, Antiquitye and Office of the Lord High Steward, Constable and Marshall of England’, c.1625, 208 fos. A collection of tracts by Sir Robert Cotton, William Camden and others, w...

Sir Robert Cotton, James VI and I and an English cenotaph for two Scottish princes

For Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), collector, bibliophile and benefactor of the British Library’sCotton Collections, dynastic prestige was paramount. Through his ancestors, the Bruces ofConington, he claimed descent from the ancient Scottish royal line and therefore kinship with hisnew sovereign, King James VI and I. A distinguished antiquarian, his extensive engagement with hisown family history was coupled with a degree of self-interest and shrewd self-promotion. This articleexamines how Cotton publicly displayed his links with the royal Stuarts as a means of securinghis own advancement and of increasing his influence within the royal household. In particular,it considers how a cenotaph, which he erected in the parish church of All Saints in Conington,Huntingdonshire, to his distant forbear, Prince Henry of Scotland (c 1115–52), may also representan oblique response to the politically destabilising death in 1612 of his own contemporary, HenryFrederick, Prince of Wales.

'Our Learned Primate' and that 'Rare Treasurie': James Ussher's Use of Sir Robert Cotton's Manuscript Library, c. 1603–1655

The historical significance of Sir Robert Cotton's famous library of manuscripts is considered through the activities of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, who used the library extensively in his work as Protestant theologian and historian. Cotton's library is singled out for particular praise on more than one occasion in Ussher's published works, and it is revealed that Ussher used nearly one hundred Cottonian manuscripts. This use is attested to in his notebooks and correspondence, the surviving records of loans made from the Cottonian Library, and from some of the Cottonian manuscripts themselves. Ussher's manuscript use is analysed with reference to his antiquarian interests as well as to his politico-theological aims for the furtherance of the reformed, established Church in Ireland.

Jennifer Summit . Memory's Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England. Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2008 . Pp. x, 343. $35.00.

This intriguing and massively researched book traces the idea of the library from the late Middle Ages well into the early modern period. The first chapter deals with the libraries used by John Lydgate: those of Duke Humfry and of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds; the second with the “lost libraries of English humanism,” focusing on Thomas More, Thomas Stanley, and Sir Thomas Elyot. From here Jennifer Summit moves on to postmonastic Reformation libraries, notably that of Matthew Parker, where her dominant argument is that “Reformation library making is .… aligned with and even contingent upon the act of library breaking”; thence she proceeds to the Cotton Library and its use as a source of evidence, with the rather extravagant claim that Robert Cotton “invented the idea of the archival source.” Finally, she investigates Francis Bacon's attitude toward libraries. He deplored them as the antithesis to the laboratories of observation for the advancement of learning, even as he deployed the classifications of knowledge that library catalogues had defined.

Tomb Destruction and Scholarship: Medieval Monuments in Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: Tomb Destruction and Scholarship: Medieval Monuments in Early Modern England Stefanie Knöll Tomb Destruction and Scholarship: Medieval Monuments in Early Modern England. By Phillip Lindley. (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas Publishing. 2007. Pp. x, 257. £35.00. ISBN 978-1-900-28987-0.) In Tomb Destruction and Scholarship, Phillip Lindley, reader in the history of art department of the University of Leicester, deals with the destruction of medieval tomb monuments in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study, which resulted from Lindley’s 2007 Leverhulme Research Fellowship, offers new insight into the mechanisms of earlymodern iconoclasm in England. At the same time, Lindley points to the side effects of destruction—that is, the increasing number of cultural tourists visiting tomb monuments as well as the growing historical scholarship. In his first chapter, Lindley recounts the fate of funerary monuments during the sixteenth century. Often parts of tombs were sold for the sake of the material. However, Lindley is able to show that tomb defacement was nothing more than “collateral damage” under King Henry VIII and that active defacement of tombs started only under King Edward VI. Now, images of saints as well as phrases requesting prayers for the dead or—for the most zealous reformers—representations of clergy in their traditional vestments were regarded as offensive. These attacks also influenced the design of new monuments. We might think of the ensuing concentration on the virtues of the deceased and the celebration of his bloodline through the display of heraldry. Lindley is convinced that it was the sixteenth-century experience of the fragility of material heritage that created a particularly strong desire to study and document tomb monuments. Chapter 2 thus analyzes the genesis and development of Tudor antiquarianism, which differs from late-medieval antiquarian attempts in various aspects: the introduction of formalized networks (Society of Antiquaries), a more critical evaluation of historical sources, and the wider dissemination through printed records. Many quotations from the works of authors such as John Leland, Sampson Erdeswick, or Ralph Brooke give a sense of the discussed antiquarian writings and point to the scholarly debates going on at the time. A good example of such debates is the argument between Camden and Brooke, which demonstrated that the knowledge of heraldry had to be supplemented by a knowledge of the stylistic development of tomb monuments as well as by archival research. Consequently, the preservation of medieval texts and the inclusion of illustrations in antiquarian works was afforded more and more importance. Significant examples such as Sir Robert Cotton’s library and John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631) are discussed in chapter 3.Weever’s publication was the first nationwide collection of epitaphs. The inclusion of illustrations in this work shows an awareness of the fact that images possess an authority distinct from that of texts. Chapter 3 further deals with the fate of tomb monuments during the Civil War, when Parliament actively encouraged iconoclasm. The Puritan iconoclast William Dowsing even kept a journal of the destructions he carried out in various churches between 1643 and 1644. [End Page 613] The first three chapters, which offer a broad overview of the attacks from the time of Henry VIII to the 1640s, are followed by three chapters with detailed case studies: Lindley employs antiquarian accounts to reconstruct the appearance of King Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury (chapter 4), to draw conclusions about the original functions of the Percy tomb in Beverley Minster (chapter 5), and to analyze the attacks and reconstructions of the Herbert monuments at Abergavenny (chapter 6). However, considering that this is a book dealing with the development of research into tomb monuments, it is disappointing that the book does not include an overall bibliography of the large number of primary and secondary sources consulted. In his conclusion, Lindley concedes that he might have exaggerated the extent of tomb destruction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, many scholars have already shown that a lot of damage was inflicted only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Still, Lindley has achieved his aim—namely, to show that early-modern attacks were endorsed by national authorities on a scale unprecedented in Western Europe...