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

Ian Gadd and Alexandra Gillespie, eds. John Stow and the Making of the English Past (1525-1605).

Studies in Early Modern Culture and the History of the Book. London: The British Library, 2004. xiv + 192 pp. index. illus. map. bibl. $60. ISBN: 0-7123-4864-6.

John Stow emerges from the pages of this handsome and lavishly illustrated collection as a kind of antiquarian polymath, a figure whose engagement with the making of the English past sprawls across disciplinary boundaries. He was, as Ian Archer and Alfred Hiatt demonstrate, an active (and sometimes…