John Gallagher's rewarding new book, Learning Languages in Early Modern England, takes its reader back to a time before Global Englishes, when the inhabitants of England needed to learn other languages in order to converse with those from beyond their borders. Focusing principally on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Gallagher pursues four different roads into his topic: in chapter 1 he lays out the various locations where languages were taught and the identities of the teachers; in chapter 2 he evaluates the print materials that were available to assist with the acquisition of spoken forms of foreign languages; in chapter 3 he looks at the kinds of language modeled in the speaking manuals and makes deductions about the aims of language learners; and in chapter 4 he considers where and how English learners used their languages abroad. This straightforward approach allows for the engaging presentation of a wealth of information, some of which is familiar from previous studies but much of which will be new to the book's readers. The repertory of printed materials described in chapter 2 will in itself constitute a major resource for future researchers in this field. Elsewhere, firsthand work with the extant print and manuscript materials—the book contains several images drawn from these sources—allows for the development of many illuminating anecdotes that demonstrate the fundamentally individual nature of the language learning experience in the period before educational standardization (the work on language learners’ diaries in chapter 4 is a particular treat in this regard).

The materials that Gallagher discusses are shown to be a vital source of social and cultural information in an argument that everywhere emphasizes the centrality of the book's topic to understandings of early modern England. When French teachers advertised their mastery of Parisian or (earlier in the period) Loire Valley French, their assertions tied in with contemporaneous thinking about language standardization and the relative desirability of dialects in English and other European languages, for example. The language modeled in the conversation manuals shows the kinds of ritual, ceremonial, and commercial situations in which English learners of foreign languages might imagine themselves functioning; those dialogues featuring women as speakers or audiences are especially precious, giving a sense of the ways in which speech might be gendered not only beyond but also within early modern England. Indeed, an interesting aspect of Gallagher's argument is that not all of the model conversations that he discusses must have been imagined taking place abroad. Such is the intensely multilingual nature of early modern England that “foreign” languages will have been encountered and used at home even by those who never intended to cross the English Channel.

Gallagher's study expands upon and updates two important volumes treating the history of French instruction in England: Kathleen Lambley's The Teaching and Cultivation of the French Language in England during Tudor and Stuart Times (1920) and Douglas A. Kibbee's For to speke French trewely: The French Language in England, 1000–1600 (1991). Both these works, it will be noted, begin earlier than Gallagher's study (the first sixty pages of Lambley's book are dedicated to the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries). No explanation is given for the decision to jettison the Middle Ages from this study. Nevertheless, it would have been interesting to read the Gallagher's thoughts on the continuities and ruptures that mark the development of languages teaching and learning across the period divide. What do the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conversation manuals owe to the manières de langage written at the turn of the fifteenth century to teach spoken French to the English, for example? And to what extent do the Oxonian teaching practices discussed in chapter 1 represent a continuation of the work of the Oxford dictatores, a group of men who taught French and Latin on the fringes of the university until about 1450? Brief consideration of the early modern language teaching materials that survive besides the conversation manuals would also have been helpful. Looking just at the conversation manuals, one wonders how learners attained the kinds of proficiency that they evidently came to enjoy. These textbooks might be supplemented by instructors and firsthand experience in ways that Gallagher discusses, but other materials were available too, and these will have shaped learners’ approaches and outcomes.

But these are small quibbles. All in all, Learning Languages in Early Modern England offers a fresh account both of the desire for foreign languages that animated early modern English culture and of some of the means pursued by the English in order to acquire them. It will be indispensable for readers interested in the histories of English foreign relations and travel as well as for those whose research treats the history of languages instruction more narrowly.