Joseph Monteyne's fascinating and complex analysis of visual print culture in late seventeenth-century London makes a welcome contribution to the ongoing rediscovery of the Restoration as a turbulent and distinct period and shades such an interpretation with suggestive and compelling nuance. He locates in the printed conceptions of the space of London and its inhabitants that arose following the Restoration a conception of the early modern body politic that challenged the rhetoric of obedience so enthusiastically embraced in 1660. Although the broad strokes of such an analysis may not be altogether surprising in the light of recent scholarship, much of the appeal of Monteyne's work is his focus on, and detailed readings of, types and varieties of sources that historians have often either overlooked or not considered in the broader context that The Printed Image provides. His holistic approach to Restoration print culture and creative and rigorous analysis of the visual aspects of that culture allow him to find illuminating links among seemingly disparate points of contest, conflict, and crisis out of which new methods of representing politics and society emerged.

Monteyne substantiates this thesis by marshaling an impressive amount and variety of evidence to prove that, in the print record, Restoration culture quickly fragmented from a brief moment of unity in 1660 into discord, instability, and uncertainty. He transforms what could be a familiar thesis through his location of visually analogous moments among five spaces, broadly defined, of Restoration London, which challenged dominant or official meanings of politics and society. Such moments of subversion in print were hardly unique to the Restoration, of course, and Monteyne does an able job illustrating how some of the radical elements of the 1650s survived in surprising ways past 1660. The depth of The Printed Image, however, becomes apparent as he recovers the process by which political and religious radical energy transformed into a broader sort of cultural subversion. Put another way, Monteyne demonstrates how the constant questioning of the Restoration establishment by market forces, physical catastrophe and disorder, and political and religious dissent was recorded in the visual print culture in such a fashion that the very principles of the regime could be regularly called into question. In the long run such a process did mortal damage to traditional notions of subjectivity.

Monteyne's use of discrete yet structurally similar case studies makes this provocative argument particularly compelling. Each of the chapters analyze how unrelated occasions of uncertainty and difficulty for the Restoration regime inspired printed visual representations of such moments that recorded and accelerated such instability. The subject of chapter 1, the London coffeehouse, is a logical place to begin since it rapidly became a space in which new forms of social exchange arose, as well as a popular point to consume printed depictions of such forms. Through sophisticated readings of proponents for, and critics of, the coffeehouse, Monteyne demonstrates how its space, because of its connections to commerce, faction, dissent, and the Arabic “other,” came to be literally seen as a site of subversion. The rest of the book follows the analytic structure of chapter 1. Chapters 2 and 3 examine two of the most clear-cut and explicit instances that questioned and challenged Restoration society: the plague and the Great Fire. As with the coffeehouse, then, both of these catastrophes became opportunities for London's ruling authorities and the forces of disorder that they feared to contest the vision of the city in the wake of disease and destruction. To Monteyne's credit, though, his analysis of such a process moves beyond rehearsals of court and opposition factions to include, for example, the emergence of new modes of scientific inquiry and description. These tools, he claims, became especially useful in attempts to visualize order anew after 1665 because the statistics used to compute the victims of the plague or the science of perspective used to map the city after the fire tended to describe a unitary vision of a stable, peaceful, and hierarchical London.

Chapters 4 and 5 illustrate how illusory that vision was, through a rich and fertile analysis of two events—the pope-burning processions and the Frost Fair of 1683–84—that would seem at first to be completely unrelated. It is perhaps not terribly surprising to find subversive and critical elements in Whig-sponsored and directed episodes of pope burning. But it is also in this section that Monteyne's training as an art historian truly pays dividends. He demonstrates not only that the representations of the pope burnings marked the emergence of sophisticated visual satire but also that the satirical visuals, tools, and impulses used to present the Whig critique of popery and tyranny were very similar to those employed to represent a moment that seemed to turn London more broadly upside down: the Frost Fair. Monteyne's analysis of the depictions of that event are perhaps more interesting and suggestive still: because the Fair itself was so chaotic and fluid, later representations of the event replicated the city itself as an uncertain and unknowable object for consumption through the print. In this way subversion and discord became marketable commodities.

The Printed Image is a rigorous, creative, and original book, and its flaws are minor. In general, Monteyne's discussion of English concern of coffee's Arabic origins is welcome and convincing, but some of his assertions in that section do not seem to be borne out by the evidence, such as his claim that Sufi Muslims were in some way comparable to Restoration nonconformists. And although Monteyne's interdisciplinary analysis is for the most part incisive, intelligent, and provocative, the vocabulary of his specific discipline can at times be difficult to follow. Such criticisms, however, do not detract from the strength of the work as a whole. The Printed Image is a work of remarkable scope and erudition; it should be widely read by Restoration scholars.