Roze Hentschell's The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England is a welcome addition to the study of the relationship between material culture and nationalism in early modern England. Whereas most scholarly work has focused primarily on the economic significance of the cloth trade, in this brief but compact work, Hentschell sets herself the ambitious task of exploring the ways in which the authors of English vernacular texts transformed the broadcloth industry into a symbol of England's “emerging and coalescing national identity” at a time when the industry and the country were in “decay” (1). Rather than focus on the established English literary canon, she incorporates a variety of genres involving the cloth trade written between 1575 and 1615, including pastoral poems, satirical plays, broadside ballads, and polemical sermons. Employing an interdisciplinary approach by conducting a close reading of the texts and accurately placing her analysis within the economic and political milieu of the time, she investigates the ways in which the authors of these texts understood and communicated the cultural significance of the cloth trade.

Hentschell's main assertion is that the authors intentionally represented England's cloth industry as the “ancient” and “famous” means by which the country became a civilized nation and had established and maintained its reputation within the international community. Essentially, as the integrity of the cloth trade went, so went the nation itself. The authors not only wrote in response to the decline of English cloth on the international market, the increasingly corrupt practices of those guilds involved in its production and sale, and the Crown's inability to resolve these troubles, but also offered suggestions about how to correct the problem.

Although she steers away from a strict temporal chronology, the way in which Hentschell divides the book into three sections, each containing two chapters, does present a sequential narrative of the processing of broadcloth—from raising the sheep, processing the wool, and selling the broadcloth, to its international promotion of and controversy over the consumption of foreign clothes. The first section focuses on the use of pastoral poetry and prose romance written in response to land enclosures and the subsequent rebellions. The land enclosures caused social unrest and reputedly produced poverty, vagrancy, crime, and ultimately riots. Sheep and their voracious appetites for land symbolized the greed of landowners who impoverished local economies. By painting sheep in a negative light, the authors made sheep the scapegoat of the nation's ills. Hentschell then progresses to the cloth workers. By focusing on the silk weaver and balladeer Thomas Deloney, she stresses the importance of cloth work as uniting people into an “imagined” community. As Hentschell notes, Deloney called workers into action by drawing on their shared sense of pride in their craft and emphasizing their role in the nation's prosperity within the international markets. Deloney believed that proactive workers laying claim to their craft, not ineffective laws, would ultimately move the nation forward.

In the second section, Hentschell posits that the English valued the international reputation of their wool cloth. With the loss of international trade caused by military conflicts on the Continent, promotional literature idealized the New World as a venue in which a new and prosperous cloth trade could revive England's international reputation. Writers reasoned that contrary to the Spaniards, who treated natives cruelly, the English, through trade, would civilize them. In essence, the English would be benevolent, civilized conquerors, and as cloth had civilized England, similarly it would domesticate the natives. Staying within the international framework, Hentschell considers how satirical works and polemical sermons present a fear of the cloth industry and the nation's further decay through the consumption of foreign cloth. Emphasizing the individual freedom that the English had in choosing their apparel, the authors reveal an increasing anxiety that the English could change their national identity as easily as changing their clothes. With the rejection of English cloth, not only did the country's economy further decline but also its moral reputation became impoverished as the vices of other countries were exhibited on the bodies of its inhabitants.

The last section presents the relationship between London drapers and the national cloth crisis as it was staged through drama and public pageantry. Thomas Middleton's Michaelmas Term affirmed his audience's perception of the stereotypical corrupt draper who intentionally cheated his clients. In contrast, pageants commissioned by Lord Mayors (members of the Company of Drapers) presented them as saviors of the trade who successfully instituted changes to the trade, unlike the Crown's economic projects.

Hentschell does a remarkable job of placing her sources within the political and economic environment in which they were written. However, she tends to assign religion only a peripheral role and consequently misses the opportunity to discuss how the writers, frequently employing an anti-Catholic rhetoric, promoted England as a Protestant, specifically Calvinist, nation. For example, in section 2, she glosses over the association of Catholicism with barbarity and immorality. When Englishmen benevolently clothed the natives, rather than massacre and imprison them as the Spanish had, they were not merely physically adorned but converted to Protestantism, the “true” religion (99). Similarly, by donning foreign cloth the English became corrupted, degenerated from the “truth,” and ceased to be English (116). Without taking into account the influence of religious confession, any discussion of early modern culture or English national identity is incomplete. In the end, nationalism is boiled down to a belief that being English is merely residing within the geographic boundaries of the country and supporting its economic interests.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this work is Hentschell's stepping outside the established English canon. As she has proven, popular literature and traditionally historical works do suggest that an intimate relationship existed between individuals and material objects. Exploring this association will aid in answering the question of what early modern English men and women believed it meant to be “English” and how they expressed this belief.