June Schlueter's The Album Amicorum and the London of Shakespeare's Time secures a place in cultural history for a group of fascinating objects and a set of social practices from early modern Europe. The album amicorum, sometimes liber amicorum or stammbüch, is an autograph album of German origin that emerged in an academic context in the sixteenth century. It was presented to a male student or professor at the point of departure from an institution and intended to serve diverse goals such as the commemoration of individuals, a reminder of wise counsel, and a presentation of moral examples. Signers would write a motto or moral, usually in Latin with a classical reference (although religious references are also found), and beneath it they would provide a respectful dedication to the album owner and a signature, most often dated and sited. At times, a watercolor illustration of a signer's coat of arms would be commissioned as a further sign of identity. These contributions were often in dialogue and interspersed with commissioned illustrations (by either the book's owner or a contributor). In this way, the album functioned as a kind of historical map of the owner's life and travels. Schlueter acknowledges that a general history of the alba amicorum would be a project difficult to manage in its magnitude, and after consulting seventy libraries or archives and examining two thousand volumes, she has narrowed the focus of this book primarily to albums maintained by travelers from northern Europe to London during the 1580s (the approximate time of the arrival of Shakespeare in London) and 1632 (the date of publication of the first Folio of the dramatist's plays). As such, the volume compliments scholarship on other fascinating accounts of the city originating with foreign visitors, and in the author's own words, the album amicorum is referred to as a “rich continental resource [that] has the potential to nuance, amend, and extend the still developing narrative of Shakespeare's time” (2). Historians, Shakespeareans, and readers interested in the iconography of emblems and the circulation of humanist culture in early modern Europe will find the book valuable.

The book comprises ten chapters, ranging from a general introduction about the material features and function of the album to case studies of individual albums such as the copiously illustrated volume maintained by Michael van Meer for approximately thirty-five years. Individual chapters are devoted to motifs and allegories found in the illustrations. I find the allusion to these albums as portraits of individuals particularly intriguing, and Schlueter repeatedly invokes the term self-fashioning or a variant thereof to invoke their significance (for instance, on 3, 28, 39, and 116). This term was brought into academic parlance in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980/2005), and although the latter is not cited in her book, it seems to me that Schlueter is using the term in a similar way. For Greenblatt, self-fashioning means the construction of identity according to a set of socially accepted codes, and the relationship between self-fashioning and forms of cultural representation was reciprocal. The creation of one's identity was influenced by visual art and literature, but this was also projected outward in forms of portraiture. Schlueter is smart to stress the alba amicorum as another form of this outward projection of individual identity through an appropriation, production, and consumption of diverse media such as textual references, visual images, signatures, and coats of arms. However, what is so striking about the album is that the projection of individual identity is achieved by a recording and documenting of relations with other individuals—the form was truly intersubjective.

As a historian of early modern print culture, I find the discussion in chapter 1 of how practitioners began to construct albums using printed books particularly fascinating. An illustrated book would be chosen, and blank pages would be inserted for manuscript additions. Furthermore, publishers even began producing illustrated books with the express purpose of serving as alba amicorum with appropriate spaces for signatures provided. Signers could also contribute to an album by pasting in a print of their choice, and suites of prints were sold specifically for this purpose. Additionally, prints often served as the source for the watercolor illustrations found in numerous albums, and Schlueter provides an evocative imaginary but plausible scenario of an album brought to a picture shop in London and the commissioning of a painting for a page based on an image seen in a printed book in the shop. This chapter would make for good reading in a seminar alongside something taken from David McKitterick's Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), particularly his chapter on the use of printed images in manuscripts.

A great deal of Schlueter's book focuses on the visual aspect of these albums, and kudos must go to the British Library for the plethora of high-quality reproductions the publication contains. A discussion of the illustration of a cockpit from van Meer's album (50–51) and its relation to the patronage activities of King James I is especially enjoyable. In chapter 5, the fascination of album makers with Queen Elizabeth is discussed, and the author's detective work turns up a hand-colored woodcut of the Tudor queen unrecorded by previous scholars and unique in that it shows an aging monarch. Chapter 7, which represents a turn away from case studies of individual albums or dignitaries to track the appearance of music and stage players, contains many beautiful watercolors of musicians and strolling performers. Much of this chapter (112–118) is devoted to an extended analysis of an image found in the album of Franz Hartmann representing a frieze of players, also reproduced on the book's dust jacket. The figures represent an allegory of the Four Elements accompanied by Night and Day, but Schlueter also suggests it is an image of actual actors costumed for roles and in procession to a performance. Following a fascinating investigation into the chronology of the album and its owner, the author is even able to suggest a context for the image (Marburg, 1605–6) and that the troupe is a group of English players in the employ of the Landgrave Moritz. The book is filled with wonderful surprises like this, buttressed by the author's obvious love for painstaking archival research and genealogy, and it should find readers across a variety of disciplines.