Frances Dolan exhibits a heightened literary, historiographical, and methodological self-consciousness, and invites other scholars to share and enjoy it. True Relations explores the ways historical actors in the early modern era presented information, in text or testimony, and how readers four centuries later render or interpret that material as evidence. It is concerned, suggestively and sometimes brilliantly, with the relatedness of relations, and the bases for supposing a story to be true. Readers, for Dolan, work almost as hard as writers, and collaborate in the assignment of authority. She has read widely across academic disciplines, though her interest in the literariness of academic exposition indicates her membership in a department of English. Without rehashing the “historicity of fiction” or the “fictionality of history,” she offers a reading of readings that recognizes the hermeneutical burdens of the present as well as the past.

A publication of 1606 announcing itself as A True and Perfect Relation of proceedings against the Gunpowder plotters provides the first test analysis. Historians have examined this text to gauge the extent of Catholic plotting and the sagacity of the state response, but Dolan's agenda is different. On trial here is the rhetoric of representation, the fascination of equivocation, and the slipperiness of words that are said to be “almost verbatim” (37). A twist of the knife (or the pen) exposes competing accounts in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography of whether and to what extent the captured conspirators were tortured. A less developed example of “suspicious and relational reading” (51) concerns a case of murder, execution, and innocence from the confessionally contested culture of the late seventeenth century.

The early modern witchcraft phenomenon spawned plays and pamphlets, trials and confessions, and “skirmishes over the indistinct boundary between evidence and story, probable and improbable” (55). In evaluating a selection of these texts, Dolan relies on, but also holds a flame to, the archival research and storytelling skills of leading historians. She brings us no closer to knowing what actually happened, but instead sensitizes readers to the indeterminacy of narratives that are hard to pin down. Another test analysis tackles reporting of the Great Fire of London and persistent but bogus claims that it was caused by treacherous Catholics. Dolan shows, though not for the first time, the fusion of imaginative fictions with partisan polemic, and the making of meaning and memory by textual and monumental means. The coming and going of the inscription blaming “barbarous papists” for the fire of 1666 is well known, though reviewed here with aplomb.

More nuanced is Dolan's interrogation of the use made by historians of the archives of the church courts, especially depositions of witnesses. Far from taking such statements as objective renditions of fact, most scholars recognize their special pleading, filtration, constructedness, and textuality. Dolan pushes for an even more explicit recognition of their lacunae, lapses, and mediations, and seems to award points or demerits to historians such as Bernard Capp, Adam Fox, Laura Gowing, Lawrence Stone, Garthine Walker, and this reviewer. While embracing the knowledge of society and gender that is gleaned from such sources, she urges those who have used them in order to tease out the voices of the voiceless to attempt a more literary analysis of their language: “If there is fiction in the archives, literary criticism needs to be there as well” (153).

Dolan demonstrates her method through an extended study of seventeenth-century domestic advice books and tracts about family relations. She builds on the work of social historians who have noted the patriarchal hectoring of many such texts and the yawning gap between prescription and practice. She advocates “taking these texts as literature” rather than “mining them for evidence” (160). Historians already suspect that writers from William Gouge to John Milton may tell us more about masculine anxiety than early modern domesticity, but Dolan's relational reading also reveals them as adepts of metaphor, exegesis, and figuration.

The remainder of the book attends to dramatic literature, distinguishing between plays as texts and theater as experience. As elsewhere in this study, Dolan considers the nested embroilment of incident and commentary, witnessing and reportage, drama and scholarship. In what sense, she asks, is a work by Shakespeare evidence, and, importantly, evidence of what? Centered on Shakespeare's collaboration with John Fletcher in Henry VIII, also provocatively titled All Is True, with side-runs at Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale, Dolan reviews some of the ways that historians have used the modern drama. She also cites skilled literary borrowers of historical information. What is needed, she suggests, is a studied interdisciplinarity “that attends to both the historical and the literary simultaneously” (216). She wants us to read more slowly, as well as more widely, and offers her own practice as a model. True Relations has elements of the manifesto, as well as manifest delight in relational interpretive practices. It deserves to be read by everyone working on early modern England.