Until recently, the printed image in early modern England—the period 1500–1700 covered by Malcolm Jones’s The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight—has been the victim of neglect by scholars, leading to the false impression that early modern English culture was predominantly a textual instead of a visual one. It has been accepted as conventional wisdom that there were very few English prints from this era, and those that do exist are crude when compared to the staggering developments in other Northern European regions such as the German-speaking territories, France, and the Netherlands. Furthermore, English trained art historians, as Jones points out, greatly admired the art of Italy but took an attitude of “unspoken contempt, or at best snobbish disdain, for that of their homeland” (viii), an attitude even more greatly compounded when presented with any material that could be considered vernacular. When scholars have paid attention to early modern British printed images, they tended to center their attention on the portrait. Thus, portraits do not appear in Jones’s book. What does appear—and here I am paraphrasing the author’s own criteria of selection—are English single-sheet prints published between 1500–1700 that are predominantly “pictorial,” but nonetheless not mere images, since the majority also include text. It is this material that has on the whole remained invisible to scholars.

Jones seeks to correct this oversight by offering a wide-ranging examination of an uncharted territory of material that had been “left out by mistake” (381). The book opens with an introduction on the use and circulation of prints in England during the early modern period. Jones exhibits an interest in printed images intended to be consumed on their own, but also in those pictures that may have had an applied use, intended to serve as aids to designing lockets, as well as inn and tavern signs. A most fascinating example of this, and of Jones’s research methods themselves, is his discussion of an obscure reference to “cheez trenchers” from what may be the earliest known advert by a print-seller in London (8). A cheese trencher is a thin wooden roundel used for the final course of a banquet in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, decorated with printed images pasted on one side, upon which was served fruit, cheese, and sweetmeats. Print sellers and stationers, it turns out, sold a number of prints in circular form in sets of six or twelve designed to be applied to the roundel, in themes such as the months, sibyls, or Aesop’s fables. Jones appears to have unearthed a number of these objects in collections in both the United States and the United Kingdom. He gives due to designs for inn signs, trenchers, and even wrappers for packs of playing cards, material condemned by canonical writers such as Middleton and Burton, and neglected by scholars since.

Jones places his own work in the footsteps of such groundbreaking exhibitions and catalogues by British Museum keepers Antony Griffiths, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603–1689 (London: British Museum Press, 1998) and Sheila O’Connell, The Popular Print in England (London: British Museum Press, 1999), as well as historian Tessa Watt’s Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). The publication of The Print in Early Modern England follows fast on the heels of even more recent interest in British printed images from this era characteristic of, for example, Michael Hunter’s edited volume Printed Images in Early Modern Britain (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), in which Jones himself has a piece, and Helen Pierce’s Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2009). For Jones a print, whether it was made for a small cheese trencher or existing as a large and complex visual emblem, is “just as much a primary historical document as the text of a letter or statute, or work of literature” (ix). With a background in English literature and linguistics, Jones identifies himself in this book as a cultural historian with a keen interest in iconography. However, the material under consideration here does not for the most part lend itself to stylistic or aesthetic considerations, and Jones is more concerned with understanding the range of visual symbols in circulation in print within the early modern English context, whether objects offered for high, middle, and even low consumers. His detailed and insightful extrapolations of themes running through groups of printed images that have all but been ignored are especially enlightening.

The introduction is followed by a section entitled “The Structured World” that includes chapters on allegories of the senses, seasons, temperaments, and elements. These are rendered in a series of images as well as schematic diagrams that incorporate diverse emblematical references. Jones’s focus here is on the survival of visual taxonomies and intellectual structures from the medieval era and their incorporation into printed images designed to provide some form of visual order or system to everyday life. A fundamental strength of this book becomes quickly apparent as Jones, quite rightly I think, resists treating prints as singular items but rather as reproductions in a dual sense—prints reproduce ideas, and often do so in the form of the series. Particularly fascinating, for example, is the discussion of coquettish and fashionable women who stand in repeatedly as signs for the seasons. Regarding these, Jones demonstrates that allegory makes acceptable a form of titillating imagery that also expresses a large degree of misogyny. Since many of the objects in this section are English appropriations of Continental prints, Jones is able to lay to rest the argument that England was simply cut off from print developments in the rest of Europe.

This first section is followed by “The Body Politic,” which includes chapters on the production of “iconic images for Protestants” (57), that is, prints associated with the threat of Catholicism, Catholic persecution, a concern for Dutch affairs, along with other foreigners, especially Spaniards, and home-grown nonconformist sects and religious mechanics. It is difficult to single out any discussion of a particular print in a short review of such a tall volume, yet the analysis of images of the “Spanish Match” (a proposed marriage alliance between England and Spain) is evocatively fleshed out with textual references to these visual representations from the diary of Sir Simon d’Ewes, a young student who assembled the earliest recorded collection of prints in England, and James I’s court jester, Archy Armstrong. Jones’s discussion of the events surrounding the so-called Sussex Picture (a lost painting copied in print believed at the time to depict Charles I under the control of his Roman Catholic queen Henrietta Maria and the Pope) demonstrates the fluidity of meaning for allegorical subjects reproduced in print.

Prints depicting virtue and vice follow in “The Moral Order.” This section brings together chapters dealing with non-satirical religious images concerned with morality and proper Christian behavior, as well as prints that warn against, but also just as likely celebrate, sinful delights. The latter—“bawdy pictures” or “soft porn” (222–23)—along with printed playing cards as sources of risqué pictures, serve as reminders of the “pervasiveness of this easily portable, yet often ephemeral, body of imagery” (230). The fourth part of the book is entitled “The Social Order” and encompasses images of the world turned upside down, social satires, ideal and un-ideal women, the battle for the breeches, cries of London, mountebanks, and, at the end, anamorphoses and “metamorphic” pictures.

The Print in Early Modern England is lavishly illustrated with high-quality reproductions, and many of the prints included have never been published. The amount of meticulous and painstaking research carried out by Jones is in evidence on every page and in the numerous appendices following the text proper. The book is truly a labor of love, and Jones’s enthusiasm for the material will inspire all who read it. He deploys great wit and humor throughout, even quoting, for example, from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. The text is also filled with vivid descriptions, such as the one of Frederic Stephens, who began cataloguing the British Museum’s extensive collection of printed personal and political satires, as the “remarkably handsome” (vi) model for the figure of Christ in Ford Madox Brown’s painting Christ Washing St Peter’s Feet (1852–56).

I cannot help but end with an anecdote: I took on reviewing this volume while teaching a graduate seminar on the printed image in Europe between 1400 and 1800. Having received the book during the middle of the semester, I placed it on my desk in a vague “to do” pile. Every student that came into my office from this graduate seminar saw it lying there, and every student made comments ranging from “this is a landmark,” and “very impressive,” to “can I borrow this?” My copy of The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight was in constant circulation until the end of the semester, when I was finally able to get it back to write this review. I can think of no better practical illustration of the book’s significance and value to scholars of early modern England and of print culture in general.