The perceived functional relationship between architecture and literature, and especially poetry, goes back a long time and is particularly apparent in Greek and Latin writers of the classical period such as Plato and Cicero. As expertly demonstrated by David Cowling in 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 compositional principles in poetry and architecture, and their thematic import. In her book, Myers chooses a different path, and an approach she terms predisciplinary rather than interdisciplinary, to that relationship, focusing on how “buildings tells stories” in post-Reformation England. In an informative and thought-provoking introduction, “Building Stories,” 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: “[I]n 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 texts about buildings as objects of historical investigation rather than considering them as literature in a traditional sense of the word. Ekphrasis and poetics is not on the agenda when she presents an “untechnical” architectural history by means of buildings described as scripted and printed texts. This is a deliberate choice, but it is also one that renders the prominence of “literature” in the title a bit misleading and possibly problematic.

This focus becomes evident in chapters that each are 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 that revises the long-established view that a Protestant fear of idolatry blocked the development in the arts, and in architecture in particular. In her stimulating and more theoretically framed second chapter, “Aristocrats and Architects,” Myers argues that 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” in the field of historiography (76). This is to a considerable 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. Spenser's Epithalanion and Prothalamion or Shakespeare's Sonnet 46 are well-known examples.

Chapter 3, “Strange Anthologies,” treats John Stowe's Survey and Jonson's The Alchemist, not in terms of literary analysis, but in a rich discussion of how the variegated fabric of London in a time of change contributes to the construction of social identity that again is utilized in Jonson's satirical comedy of city life. I do not agree, however, that this is an understudied field. The opening poem of George Herbert's The Temple is the subject of the book's by far longest chapter, “Restoring ‘The Church-Porch,’” in which Myers reads the poem as a record of continued religious ritual and customs. The chapter is a fine contribution to English architectural history rather than to poetry proper, and it systematically situates the poem in a wide communal cultural context

Chapter 5 analyzes the promotion of Anne Clifford's private and 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 understood in terms of documents proving ancestral rights to property, whereas chapter 6 moves into aesthetics, providing a thoughtful analysis of John Evelyn's attempt to integrate visual aesthetics with a historical interpetation of architecture. The final chapter or coda comes as a surprise and hangs awkwardly at the end of the book with an almost entirely different focus, on the restoration of a church in modern London.

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. 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 tendency to underrate the fact that it is in its substantial contributions in poetry and drama that England produces the closest equivalent to Italian Renaissance art and architecture.