With the possible exceptions of William Camden and John Selden (who has of late become a minor industry), few English antiquaries of the seventeenth century have received as much attention as William Dugdale (1605–86). The volume of essays under review, edited by Christopher Dyer and Catherine Richardson, is based on a conference held in 2006 to mark the 350th anniversary of the publication of Dugdale's most famous work, the Antiquities of Warwickshire. It follows a book, published in 1956 under the editorship of the late Levi Fox, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Antiquities. The differences between the two collections are instructive and a measure of the different priorities and interests of the modern generation of scholars concerned with the history of history. Fox's slim volume (which has aged surprisingly well, many of its six chapters still often cited) was all about the status of different types of protomodern scholarship in Tudor and Stuart times—including the ancillary disciplines that in German go by the name Hilfswissenschaft—and thus had an implicit positivist agenda; Dyer and Richardson's tends to be more contextual and less internalist. The earlier volume had not very much about Dugdale himself, whereas half of the modern one is devoted to different aspects of his work and career. Dugdale's intellectual interests went well beyond the antiquarian to embrace even the narrative of recent times, though as Peter Borsay aptly notes in his chapter on Warwickshire towns, Dugdale appears at times to have had a “pathological aversion to the present” (187).

Dugdale stands in some ways to English antiquarianism in the same position that J. S. Bach, who was born a year before Dugdale died, occupies with respect to Western music—a prolific but also transitional figure. (Both were also prolific in another sense—of fathering many children.) No one would claim Bach-like genius for the English herald and antiquary, but Dugdale stands at the cusp of two very different sets of preoccupations and approaches. Born at the high tide of Elizabethan and Jacobean antiquarian scholarship, which veered toward the philological and genealogical and tended to use physical artifacts to illustrate or illuminate historical points derived fundamentally from texts (and especially from classical sources), Dugdale died in the age of the Royal Society, of nascent Baconian science, and of a much more systematic, classificatory approach to natural and man-made antiquities that overlaps with natural history. One of the strengths of William Dugdale, Historian is that it shows his connections with both worlds and with older and younger generations of scholars, from Sir Symon Archer, a generation his senior; to Elias Ashmole (only a decade younger but the husband of Dugdale's daughter); and Anthony Wood, a quarter-century Dugdale's junior.

There is no space to summarize individually the eleven chapters (and brief but substantive introduction and conclusion by Dyer), but some highlights should be noted. Several chapters are rather peripherally connected to Dugdale but will appeal to a broader readership: for instance, Steve Hindle's excellent piece on Sir Richard Newdigate, another midland squire and “fiscal seigneurialism,” N. W. Alcock's analysis of late seventeenth-century Warwickshire society as revealed in the Hearth Tax Assessments of 1662–74, or Catherine Richardson's essay on contemporary material culture. Others are principally about Dugdale as a scholar or deal with a subset of his oeuvre. Graham Parry writes his customarily clear and elegant analysis of the Antiquities, pointing out especially its preoccupations with etymological speculations of the sort that fueled the early, Elizabethan “college” of antiquaries and, of course, with genealogy and heraldic display, key elements of the honor code of the gentry. Jan Broadway offers a sympathetically skeptical appraisal of Dugdale as an autobiographer, writing his own Life as it drew to an end and taking some creative license with it (thereby unwittingly providing ammunition to those such as John Anstis who accused him of taking credit for others' work). Stephen K. Roberts provides a richly detailed appraisal of Dugdale's post-Restoration activities as a herald and a historian based on sources in private hands and at the College of Arms (and taking a closer glance at Dugdale's composition of his understudied Short View of the Late Troubles in England). Richard Cust treats questions of honor among the gentry in an essay that commences with a dispute at the High Court of Chivalry between Dugdale and an attorney who accused him of being a cuckold and challenged his right to bear arms; Cust's essay neatly complements Vivienne Larminie's broader survey of gentry culture. Ann Hughes accounts for Dugdale's activities during the Civil War when, despite his distaste for religious radicalism and particular hatred of Presbyterianism, he did not follow other royalists into exile, choosing instead to bide his time quietly while pursuing an active agenda of antiquarian, private consulting and heraldic activity.

A strength of the volume is that the publishers have not been sparing in the inclusion of useful illustrations, such as photographs of monuments, family portraits, contemporary engravings of country houses, and folios drawn from various printed books and manuscripts. Combined with the wide range of topics covered by its authors, these make for an attractive and informative book, the title of which does not entirely do its contents justice. It will be of value to those interested in both the state of scholarship in the mid- to late seventeenth century and in more general issues of social interaction, living arrangements, and cultural conventions that are, of course, the essential landscape for understanding that scholarship in the first place.