In The Landscape Studies of Hayman Rooke (1723–1806): Antiquarianism, Archaeology and Natural History in the Eighteenth Century, Emily Sloan offers a portrait of the life and work of an as-yet under-studied figure in English natural history. In addition to filling this gap, Sloan's biographical study has more general ambitions: Rooke, as the introduction promises, “offers an example of a provincial antiquary through whom to explore the influences on his thinking and practice as a window onto geographies of knowledge, rather than as a reconstruction of the life of an exceptional man” (2). Sloan maps these geographies of knowledge through Rooke's correspondence and circulation networks, his local fieldwork practices, and the more general bodies of knowledge these studies contributed to. The result is a picture of eighteenth-century natural history as a varied field of study, wherein a number of writers, collectors, and illustrators collaborated to draw together diverse lines of inquiry.

In its five chapters, the volume examines Rooke's life and social networks (chapter 1), his meteorological and botanical studies (chapter 2), and his studies of both ancient and Roman British antiquities (chapters 3 and 4 respectively), and it concludes with a brief consideration of his contribution to regional landscape study (chapter 5). Born in 1723 to a family of military men, Rooke began his own military career at the age of fourteen. Here, he developed the draughtsman skills that aided him in his later landscape studies and the eye for military topography that would inform much of his interest in Roman roads, camps, and forts. Rooke retired from the military in 1761 and permanently settled in Mansfield Woodhouse in 1777, when he began to regularly contribute studies and plates to the Gentleman's Magazine, Archaeologia, and the Antiquarian Record. In the course of his research, Rooke corresponded with a number of better-known antiquarians, including Samuel Pegge, Richard Gough, and John Douglas. Though Rooke authored only a few pamphlets and short volumes of his own—including his 1790 Remarkable Oaks—he contributed illustrations to a number of important texts from the period, including Gough's Sepulchral Monuments and Francis Grose's Antiquities of England and Wales. Rooke's career offers a valuable reminder that knowledge production in the period hinged not on sole authorship, but collaboration between figures with varying levels of skill and expertise, often in the pages of popular magazines.

The diversity of Rooke's interests is illustrative of the fluidity of natural history in this period. Following in the tradition of other natural historians like Robert Plot, Rooke's areas of interest were indistinct, and covered a range of natural phenomena and historical remains. In the book's second and strongest chapter, Sloan examines Rooke's meteorological studies. As critics such as Jan Golinski, Vladimir Jankovic, and Jayne Lewis have noted, the field of eighteenth-century meteorology was somewhat haphazard, caught in a transition from an emphasis on the extraordinary and the local to the quantifiable and more general. In the midst of this transition, Rooke kept a regular log of the temperature and barometric pressure while also recording unusual, even wonderful, events. Rooke also attempted to make his meteorological observations useful: an understanding of general weather patterns could aid in agricultural management. This emphasis on utility connects his meteorological studies to his botanical studies of trees. Rooke was particularly interested in the cultivation of lumber, which Sloan connects to his patriotic spirit. Sloan even connects these agricultural interests to Rooke's antiquarian studies; fascinated as he was by druidical rock formations, it seems unsurprising that Rooke would take an interest in oak trees as symbols of an ancient national past.

In the diversity of his interests, the collaborative spirit of his correspondence, and his ambition to scale up from the local phenomenon to the more general pattern, Rooke does seem to offer a useful example of the typical eighteenth-century natural historian. In this regard, his work merits closer scholarly attention. Sloan's case for the significance of Rooke's work is, however, less convincing when she argues for its exceptionalism. In her examination of Rooke's studies of ancient Britain, for example, Sloan suggests that his excavation practices were “somewhat different,” casting doubt on “the prevailing idea that ‘proper’ excavation did not start until the nineteenth century” (108). While it does seem that Rooke spent more time excavating barrows than many of his contemporaries, who sometimes opened several barrows in a single day, it is unclear that this amounted to an intentional, or even conscious, practice. Though Sloan repeatedly lauds Rooke's slow, methodical pace when opening barrows, she acknowledges that “it may just have been that Rooke's laborers were slow” (106). As she also notes, Rooke's own illustrations of excavations make “it hard to ascertain what constituted regular practice for Rooke” (105).

Occasionally, Sloan's investment in Rooke's reputation leads her to underemphasize potentially more interesting elements of his work. Sloan frequently insists on Rooke's reputation for accuracy, though this claim appears in contradiction with her observation that Rooke's illustrations frequently included stylized elements; his “Appearance of the Meteor as seen from behind Mr. Rooke's house,” for example, “offers a fairly detailed drawing of the landscape, even if the trees on the left of the frame are a little stylised; somewhere between a realistic depiction of the farmland and a diagram” (56). Indeed, a number of Rooke's plates combine realistic depictions with stylized diagrams, though this technique is regrettably under-theorized in Sloan's volume. Sloan also notes that Rooke's sketches of trees “appear somewhat stylised, offering a general impression of an overall view rather than an attempt to generate a scientific text” (33). Rooke's use of stylization alongside his more empirically rigorous illustrations warrants closer attention.

Rooke's work was, as the conclusion concedes, “fairly conventional,” and his “approach to antiquities and to natural history subjects generally adhered to traditional epistemologies of observation and descriptive record” (158). This makes for a useful window onto the dominant practices of the period, but it seems to undercut many of Sloan's claims for Rooke's exceptional or unusual excavation practices and illustrative techniques.