Although this substantial volume aims to chart the development of gem engraving from Roman times to the present, it is very largely centred on the period from the Tudors until the reign of Queen Victoria. For this late period Dr Kagan has had the benefit of the magnificent collection of gems in the State Hermitage collected by Catherine the Great and others, including many intaglios and cameos cut by British engravers such as Charles and William Brown and Nathaniel Marchant, and indeed Part II of the volume is a catalogue of these ‘modern’ gems in St Petersburg. Although these will not directly concern many readers of Britannia, they and indeed chs 2–5 in Part I provide a fascinating insight into the development of classicism which played a part in the creation of a British Romanitas, both by collecting and through new creations. This passion for the Roman past in miniature can also be seen in John Boardman's reassembly of The Marlborough Gems formerly at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire (2009) and in the more general collecting of Roman coins by Thomas Hearne and others. This undoubtedly fed in to a growing curiosity about Roman Britain, though hardly to the extent that one might have expected, the main local antiquarian interests in Britain being mainly topographical and to a degree epigraphic, rather than artistic.

Roman and medieval Britain is consigned to ch. 1, ‘the roots’, the few pages on gems in Roman Britain being culled almost inevitably from the present reviewer's corpus of engraved gems from British sites. She has done quite a good job, and there are indeed gems illustrated not in the corpus (though published elsewhere), several of them in colour. However, it is all too apparent that in the transmission of information K. was writing at a remove. Where, for example, is the evidence that images produced by one and the same hand can be found on the reverses of ancient coins and on gems? It is stated incorrectly that until the first century a.d. gem-seals were limited to cornelians. This is untrue, as a large variety of stones was used in the Augustan age, though of course until c. a.d. 43 few are recorded from Britain. We would no longer follow Jocelyn Toynbee in seeing the Victory with trophy intaglio from Lullingstone, Kent, as of local or ‘Celtic’ workmanship; indeed it is a high-quality seal most probably in the possession of Pertinax when he was governor of Britain (see M. Henig, JBAA 160 (2007), 1–7). However K. is right that there were indeed gem workshops in Britain and these deserve further study.

To what extent we can really observe continuities in the use of gems into the Anglo-Saxon period and on into the Middle Ages is a moot point. Certainly gems were cut and set in rings, seals and brooches during medieval times but no attempt has been made to separate British from French material, and the most recent study seems to show that many of the gems in British jewellery settings were imported in the twelfth century from Italy and indeed the Crusader lands to the east (see M. Henig, ‘The re-use and copying of ancient intaglios set in medieval personal seals’, in N. Adams, J. Cherry and J. Robinson, Good Impressions. Image and Authority in Medieval Seals (2008), 25–34).

Only in chs 2–4 does K. reach the, for her, firm ground of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century gem cutting and collecting. From then on she writes with a magisterial authority which she maintains in the rest of the book. But then, although it is possible that some of the gems in the collection of Abraham Gorley (Gorlaeus) of Delft purchased for Prince Henry in 1609 or the following year were found in the southern Netherlands, there is no substantive evidence that they were. The majority were lost or (more probably) destroyed in a fire at Whitehall Palace in 1694, but one got away and found its way to Devizes Museum; the most that can be said is that this reviewer once published it as a British find before finding conclusive evidence in the Arundel papers that it was aliena.