The perceived functional relationship between architecture and literature, especially poetry, goes back a long time and is particularly apparent in Greek and Latin writers of the classical period like Plato and Cicero. As expertly demonstrated by David Cowley in The Building the Text: Architecture as Metaphor in Late Medieval and Early Modern France (Oxford, 1998), architectural imagery served important symbolical and didactic functions, and Alastair Fowler, Maren-Sofie Røstvig, Anthony Johnson, and others have studied the close parallels between compositionnal principles in poetry and architecture and their thematic import. In her book, Myers chooses a different path and pursues a predisciplinary rather than an interdisciplinary approach to that relationship, focusing on how “buildings tells stories” in post-Reformation England. In an informative and thought-provoking introduction titled “Building Stories” (1–22), she chooses the antiquarian John Leland for her first narrator and draws attention to his urge to salvage what was left of the monuments of England's rich Catholic past: “To Leland's antiquarian eye, architectural and written forms of history were necessarily intertwined: buildings, like documents, communicated history (1). Myers's statement reveals a bias for considering buildings and texts about buildings as objects for historical investigation, rather than considering literature as literature. Ekphrasis and poetics are not on the agenda when she presents an “untechnical” architectural history by means of buildings described in scripted and printed texts. This is a deliberate historiographical and almost sociological choice—one that renders the prominence of “literature” in the title a bit misleading and possibly problematic.

This focus becomes evident in chapters that are each centered on one writer in the main. In the first chapter, “Loss and Foundations,” William Camden's “literary archaeology” and his account in Britannica of material buildings are the focus, in what may be termed an alternative history of mentality, which revises the long-established view that a Protestant fear of idolatry blocked the development in the arts, and in architecture, in particular. In a stimulating and more theoretically framed second chapter, “Aristocrats and Architects,” Myers argues that Sir Henry Wotton's Elements of Architecture and the country house poetry of Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, and Thomas Carew allow us to see the architecture and the architectural writing of early modern England, “not as a fractured reflection of classicism,” but as “a sophisticated and ingeniously adapted art” (76) in the field of historiography. This is to some extent true, but the balanced design of the Elements and the proportioned totality of “Upon Appleton House” do provide us with precisely the classical forms missed. Already in the previous century, architectural imagery inspired architecturally designed poems. Edmund Spenser's Epithalanion and Prothalamion are well-known examples.

Chapter 3, “Strange Anthologies,” treats John Stowe's Survey and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist in a rich discussion of how the variegated fabric of London's cityscape in Stowe contributes to the construction of social identity that again is utilized in Jonson's satirical urban comedy. But his is not an understudied field. In the book's by far longest chapter, “Restoring ‘The Church-porch,’” Myers reads George Herbert's poem as a record of continued religious ritual and customs. The chapter is a fine contribution to English architectural history and systematically situates the poem in a wide communal cultural context, but it avoids compositional issues. Myers devotes chapter 5 to Anne Clifford's dynastic interests, offering a stimuating discussion and careful documentation of Clifford's modus operandi on behalf of family and class. Here literature is almost wholly reduced to documents proving ancestral rights to property, whereas chapter 6 (“Recollections”) moves into aesthetics in a thoughtful analysis of John Evelyn's attempt to integrate visual aesthetics and antiquarianism with historical interpretation of architecture in his translation of Roland Fréart's Parallèle de l'architecture antique avec la moderne (1650). The book's coda comes as quite a surprise by discussing the various issues raised by the restoration of St. Helen's Bishopgate, London, in the 1990s. Though interesting in itself, it does not belong in this book.

When arguing against a Protestant uniformity of sensibility and expression that was far from universal, Myers runs the risk of paying insufficient attention to the tectonic principles embodied in early modern English poetics and literature, and the poets’ dialogue with both classical and contemporary continental models. If we become more sensitive to the narrative functions of architecture, she argues, we begin to understand how writers viewed and drew on the buildings that surrounded the production of early modern texts. Myers convincingly documents how architecture inspired a sizable body of historiographic and literary works, showing that Protestant fear of idolatry did not dominate the period's response to architecture. There is however a clear tendency in Myers's study to underrate the fact that England's substantial contributions to world poetry and drama, and to what Walter Pater termed “literary architecture,” is where the country rivals the art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance.