Gesa Stedman's book deals with the period from 1625 to 1690 and investigates “the struggle for cultural, economic, and political hegemony between England and France,” alongside “the anxieties about a loss of national identity if England and the English way of life did not prevail” (1). While the book's title is perhaps a little misleading because the cultural exchange that concerns Stedman is primarily one-way, she is clear about her project's central questions: “how did English culture and literature change in the seventeenth century and how did it react to and accommodate the ‘Second Norman Conquest,’ as Dryden called it, in the second half of the century” (16).

The book has four chapters, beginning with an introductory section that lays out the parameters of the project and makes the case for Stedman's theoretical approaches. The second chapter concerns Queen Henrietta Maria's role as a “cultural mediator” (51), while the third chapter investigates Restoration contributions to Anglo-French cultural relations, discussing the prevalence in England of French imports such as music and fashion, alongside evidence of English anxieties about a loss of social status and national identity. The enormous fourth chapter continues this thread, investigating representations of cultural exchange in literary texts and visual images.

The book is most valuable, I think, for the ways in which it integrates historical and literary modes of interpretation. At the heart of Stedman's approach to cultural exchange is “the interaction between literature and politics” and “between norms of representation and the political and cultural conditions of England after the Restoration” (1). She takes her concept of “cultural exchange” from the work of German and French cultural historians such as Hartmut Kaelble, who urged scholars to pay attention to not only “the exchange of capital, labourers, goods, concepts and ideas, but also the images of and debates about the other society” (1–2). Usefully bringing this work to an English-speaking audience, Stedman investigates seventeenth-century cultural exchange at the same time as she participates in a transnational academic conversation herself.

Her book is organized using categories developed by the historian Urs Bitterli, who proposed three different stages of cultural exchange between nations. Stedman's chapter on Henrietta Maria models itself around Bitterli's category of “cultural contact,” which, she explains, is “an initial, short-lived or intermittent encounter” between cultures and, in England, began with Henrietta Maria's marriage to Charles I (15). The later chapters discuss Bitterli's concepts of “cultural relationship” and “collision,” arguing that the period after the Restoration saw a vacillation in England between these two terms, with the former signifying a “prolonged series of reciprocal contacts on the basis of political equilibrium or stalemate” and the latter characterized by a situation in which “the weaker party, in military and political terms, was threatened with the loss of cultural identity” (15).

Stedman does a good job of acknowledging the limits of her approach (recognizing, for example, that Anglo-French relations date back at least to 1066 and noting that no culture is homogenously “native” [13–14]). It is then, perhaps, a little churlish to take issue with her organizing categories, but they do feel less historically accurate than conveniently structural. For example, chapter 2's focus on Henrietta Maria and the Caroline period means that Stedman does not consider earlier precedents, creating the impression that Henrietta Maria was at the vanguard of Anglo-French “cultural contact.” An investigation into foreign tradesmen and tradeswomen in London might have provided a useful balance here, especially because Stedman does undertake research into the “different people of different social backgrounds” who were involved in spreading French ideas and practices in England after the Restoration (63) when, in chapter 3, she moves on to Bitterli's concepts of “cultural relationship” and “collision,” and begins to analyze the “groups of cultural mediators responsible for developing and maintaining Anglo-French relations in the second half of the seventeenth century” (63).

The enormous fourth chapter takes up 57 percent of the book and deals with the ways in which late seventeenth-century authors represented their concerns about “cultural purity, national identity, and cultural transformation” (107). “Representation,” Stedman argues, makes cultural exchange visible to “more than the immediate witnesses and mediators” and “enables those who shape opinions to define more clearly what they perceive to be their own indigenous culture by setting it off against foreign influences” (109). She is interested here in “plot,” “character,” and “characterisation,” arguing that only by “looking for the hidden plots in texts does the cultural agenda that drives them become apparent” (110). Investigating works such as John Lacy's The Old Troop (ca. 1663) and William Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing Master (1673), she examines a shift from “an explicit rejection of French culture with thinly veiled threats of violence to an acceptance of some elements of French culture, most notably fashion” (125).

The book is clearly written, largely free from obscurantist jargon, and delivers what it sets out to do: that is, “to combine literary analysis with methods more familiar to history or Cultural Studies” and to “analyse rather than merely take for granted important cultural developments concerning not just English culture, but French culture as well” (258–59). It takes seriously the notion that “cultural exchange cannot be analysed if the impact of representation and reflection is not taken into account” (259) and makes use of a wide range of materials, from trade manuscripts, to diaries and letters, to “full-scale literary works,” in order to “illuminate the context of representation” (259). What emerges here is a discussion of cultural stereotypes that reveal Englishmen and women's changing attitudes to interaction with France and the French. The multilingual research that has gone into the book, combined with the use of contemporary German work on cultural exchange, narratology, and metaphor theory, makes it a valuable and refreshing resource that both draws attention to an interesting field of study and opens it up for further research.