This book aims to be a comprehensive guide to the “clandestine” (i.e., unlicensed) satires of the late seventeenth century that now survive (primarily) in manuscript collections. In the first section, Love divides satire, or “lampoons,” into three categories: court, town, and state. These denote not so much distinct poets or poems as sites on and purposes for which lampoons were composed and received. Court lampoons were weapons in factional, personal disputes; town lampoons were the means by which a newly urbanized elite reflected upon and regulated itself; state satire attacked or defended the government. The second part of the book considers the authorship of lampoons, their formal characteristics, classical and French influences, and the circumstances of their composition, dissemination, and survival. Finally, there is a very long appendix comprising a first-line index to selected manuscript anthologies. This lists over four thousand poems in about eighty manuscript volumes in libraries across the United States and United Kingdom (plus the early eighteenth-century printed editions of Poems on Affairs of State). Many of these volumes, Love explains, will soon be part of a microfilm collection by Adams Matthew Publications, and so the appendix is intended as a help to users.

Love's approach to his subject is eclectic. He easily plays the role of connoisseur, passing judgment on the literary merits of particular works. He is most interesting, though, when he puts on an anthropological hat, insisting that the composition, performance, reception, and transmission of lampoons must be understood as social processes in which the lampoons were used by actors to achieve various ends. Lampoons were given as gifts by visitors to hosts or clients to patrons; they served to cement social bonds by creating shared laughter, prompting a shared conversation, or confirming the insiderhood of those members of a group who could decode their obscure allusions; they were composed by their authors in order to establish their status as wits, or, just as important, as the possessors of fresh gossip; they were deployed as weapons in factional struggles; they were valued for providing actual news of current events, being rightly considered more reliable than the strictly regulated “legitimate” press. Indeed, our very knowledge of these works is itself a result of complex processes by which some poems circulated only as separates and were eventually lost in the trash while others were recorded for a variety of motives in personal miscellanies or scribal anthologies. Love effectively makes the case that twenty-first-century readers cannot hope to understand lampoons until we have reconstructed their very alien conditions of intelligibility and the role that they played in the social lives of those who wrote, read, sung, copied out, or were victimized by them. The book is a fertile source of questions, some of which the author answers and others of which he generously leaves for future scholars: Why did families treasure and pass down collections of clandestine verses that even at the time of their preservation were of interest only as ancient gossip? Why didn’t more women write lampoons? How did people cope with the experience of being the target of a lampoon? To what extent, and in what sense, did readers regard lampoons as being “true”? Why did some individuals (not necessarily the most powerful or sinful) achieve the status of “lampoon star,” that is, become connected with traits or stories that, by virtue of constant repetition, were instantly recognizable to contemporary readers (but always baffle modern ones)?

It is hard, however, to discern a sustained argument in the book. Love throws so many balls in the air that he does not stick with a topic long enough to make a compelling case about anything in particular, and at times he offers assertions with little backup. It should be noted, though, that Love's organizational choices do constitute implicit arguments, and these need to be brought to the surface and examined. We might ask, for example, how useful it is to divide satires into the three categories of court, town, and state. Love does not explicate his assumptions about the relations between these sites: he seems to assume that factional struggles at court are “personal” and can be distinguished from politics, and he regards the “town” as unconcerned with state affairs (despite the fact that many of its denizens sat in parliament). Moreover, as Love himself admits, depictions of the sexual shenanigans at court carried rich metaphorical meanings about corruption, tyranny, Catholicism, and the abuse of power. The distinctions between court, town, and state satire turn out to be hazy. The chronological frame of the book is also underexplained. The premise of the book is that the Restoration lampoon constitutes a distinctive genre, but exactly what distinguishes it from anything else (e.g., from the railing rhymes of James I's reign that have been so well analyzed by Alastair Bellany) is never spelled out. The peculiar choice of 1702 as a terminal date is also never justified and may mislead a reader into thinking that attacks on court rivals or political opponents were conducted with becoming decency in Queen Anne's reign.

Love's approach to the relationship of text and context, representation and reality, is also frustratingly inconsistent. The book begins with a wonderful discussion of the image of the second Duke of Buckingham, which points out that most of what we think we know about this colorful figure is derived from satire and is patently false. This cautionary lesson seems forgotten, however, when Love sets out to describe the cultural milieu from which the satires emerge. His account of town sociability and mores is drawn almost entirely from depictions on the Restoration stage. His comments on the “Hobbesianism” of court satire comes uncomfortably close to treating it as a transparent expression of the Hobbesianism of court life.

Even in this apparently comprehensive overview, therefore, there lurk unacknowledged and undefended arguments. The student inspired by Love to explore the rich continent of late seventeenth-century clandestine satire might want to think critically about the map she's been given. Still, if it were not for Love's work over the course of a long career, she would not even know that the continent exists. For this she can be grateful.