Mark Netzloff has edited the first modern spelling edition of John Norden's The Surveyor's Dialogue using the 1618 edition as his copy-text. This much overlooked work was originally intended for a general rather than a specialist readership (xxii) and throughout the six books the reader is schooled by Norden's surveyor in a wide variety of topics relating to land ownership, manorial culture and human engagement with the early modern rural environment. Norden's surveyor is at pains to explain the lexicon necessary to understand, measure, manage and adapt early modern landscapes on and off the page. The interlocutors explore topics ranging far beyond the mechanics of land measurement into both legal and customary linguistic registers and also the material practices of husbandry and land use. Through both the thorough introduction and detailed footnotes, Netzloff offers an erudite yet accessible vantage point from which the reader can engage with the vocabularies, rights, and practices within which the discourse is embedded. As well as considering the various landscapes, terms, and concepts which are deployed, Netzloff also points to the ‘text's gaps’ and their significance (xxxv). Norden ‘wrote his text in the months following’ the Midlands Rising and Netzloff suggests that whilst this event is not explicitly mentioned within the text ‘Norden deliberately sets his dialogue at exactly the same time’ (xxxv). Netzloff foregrounds crucial contexts such as popular protest and enclosure of wastes in terms of both what is incorporated but also the text's ‘key omissions’ (xxxii).

In his introduction, Netzloff notes that The Surveyor's Dialogue has been of interest to a wide variety of different disciplines, but that scholars have tended to ‘read far too selectively’ (xxxii). He hopes that his edition will facilitate examination of the text as a whole and suggests that particular issues will be highlighted by this process (xx). These include ‘representation of the agrarian poor’ and ‘changes occurring to the natural landscape such as deforestation’ (xx) and drainage of the fens (xxix). These topics have been of increasing concern to social and landscape historians. Netzloff highlights local or marginal identities, the importance of custom and practice, and issues of both commons and enclosure whilst situating these in relation to national ‘market driven models of land ownership’ (xxvi). The introduction draws on the work of a variety of critics including Andrew McRae and Bernhard Klein and a diverse range of theorists, which helps to reframe the register of the text and tease apart its particular historical hiatus within the emerging cultural landscape. This includes the work of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. The introduction shows a keen awareness throughout of ‘human agents’ (xviii) and their engagement in landscape production within a ‘social habitus’ (xxvi) and more specifically within a ‘neofeudal environment’ (xxvi). In this way, Netzloff's edition represents a key contribution to the debates surrounding the place of the ‘social’ in landscape, which arise from the emerging fields of early modern cultural geography and multidisciplinary landscape studies.