Besieged: Early Modern British Siege Literature, 1642–1722, by Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson, was published in January 2021, the same month in which the word siege found its way to the forefront of the American political consciousness. In coverage and analysis of the riots at the US Capitol Building on 6 January, major newspapers and radio stations began to recruit the term: “‘The Place Was under Siege’: Globe Reporter Describes the Scene inside the Capitol Building” (Jazmine Ulloa, Boston Globe, 6 January 2021); “Inside a Deadly Siege: How a String of Failures Led to a Dark Day at the Capitol” (Mark Mazzetti et al., New York Times, 10 January 2021); “Following Capitol Siege, Veterans Hope for More Deradicalization Programs” (Steve Walsh, NPR, 20 January 2021). Although curiosity about modern questions informs a great deal of very strong historical research in the humanities, it is rare for scholarly work and real-time political events to intersect so precisely. Of course, I—along with most others—would have preferred that Besieged had seen publication in a more peaceful moment. But it is also true that the kind of work necessary to produce a book like this—deliberate archival research; thorough consideration and analysis of literature and history; patient writing and revision; collaboration with a co-author, peer reviewers, and press staff—represents practices and habits that run counter to reactive violence. In this way, Besieged is poised to help academic readers, as well as their students and other interlocutors, learn from past human responses to civil violence, and bring that learning to bear on the present moment.

Besieged “trace[s] the siege motif as it evolved in literature (broadly defined) from the mid seventeenth through the early eighteenth centuries in Britain” (255). In addition to this larger aim, Alker and Nelson also offer several arguments about what the siege motif does, suggesting, for instance, that “it is often associated with a more inclusive understanding of the heroic that takes into account the valiant role and noble sacrifice of nonmilitary actors and civilian communities in war” (255). The greatest strength of this book is its sweeping archive of primary-source texts. Across six chapters, the reader encounters diaries, correspondence, memoirs, prose fiction, and various forms of drama and poetry. Besieged is clearly the product of sustained and disciplined reading, and other scholars will no doubt find the book to be a valuable starting point for further work.

At times, however, this wide-ranging approach raises questions that might be better treated by a study focused on doing more with less. For instance, Alker and Nelson are clearly interested in matters of genre; indeed, the book is organized along generic lines. The chapters tend to investigate how sieges ancient and modern take shape, say, onstage or in ballads, but I often wanted to know more about the implications of the “potency of literary siege space” (12) for genre itself: that is, how does the representation of a siege challenge, extend, or otherwise shift the form of what it attempts to represent? In addition, it can be difficult to find Alker and Nelson in the book's prose: frequent quotation at length from other scholars, combined with a tendency toward passive verb constructions, can occlude the arguments that the authors are proposing. I make this point in part because I think Alker and Nelson have drawn attention to a topic that should be of genuine interest not only to other scholars but also to a larger reading public who would likely find the proliferation of academic names—and some passing references to complex concepts, such as a mention of J. L. Austin and speech-act theory (38) that receives no further development—distracting at best.

The most compelling discussions emerge in those places where Alker and Nelson do linger over one text for a longer stretch, allowing their own voices to come more resolutely to the fore. Especially engaging are the treatments of John Mitchelburne's Ireland Preserv'd: or the Siege of London-Derry (1705)—which concludes the second of two chapters on drama—and the examination of John Bunyan's allegorical prose fiction The Holy War (1682), to which all of chapter 6 is devoted. In a captivating final gesture, Alker and Nelson extrapolate their argument that “Bunyan modernizes siege allegory” to reconsider Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year (1722), which, “while not an allegory, might be said to retain vestiges of Bunyan's emphasis on traumatized city space, extended suffering, and eyewitness testimony” (254).

In their brief epilogue, Alker and Nelson conclude with a reflection on how the word “siege” has been applied to events in the modern era, ranging from conflicts in “Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and . . . Ukraine” (257) to popular movies and video games, to rhetoric deployed by pro-Brexit groups. It is clear that Alker and Nelson have hit upon a concept that will remain in the collective consciousness for some time. I began by noting descriptions of the riots at the US Capitol, but for nearly a year preceding that incident, the global community had been living with a more chronic problem that has also attracted the language of besiegement. In late 2020, Peter Schjeldahl reviewed the art show “100 Drawings from Now” in the New Yorker (“The Melancholy Gestalt of Isolation,” 14 December 2020). In his conclusion, he ponders the implications of art as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on: “We are waiting this out with nostalgia for lost freedoms, fear and empathy in the present, and, perhaps, vague anticipation of eventual survivor's guilt. . . . Some of us—artists—are undergoing the siege in ways that can alert us to the subjective dimensions of an objective calamity. We should want those people to keep it up as best they can.” Alker and Nelson end on a similar note, acknowledging human perseverance despite the most difficult circumstances. I suspect that their book will be the first among several that seek to understand how human beings living long before us made sense of catastrophe in their private writing, on their stages, in poetry, in prose fiction, and in many other art forms.