Commissioned to accompany the exhibition of the same name held at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, in 2013–14, West Country to World’s End is a collection of short but splendidly illustrated essays, which touch on many different aspects of West Country life during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

The book begins with a helpful introduction by Sam Smiles, which sketches out the historical background and considers how the inhabitants of Devon and Cornwall were affected by national events between 1485 and 1603. As one would expect, Smiles pays particular attention to the momentous consequences of the Reformation, touching, for example, on the bloody repression of the Western Rising of 1549 – surely the most traumatic event of the entire period as far as the ordinary people of Devon and Cornwall were concerned – and on the ways in which monasteries, priories and other former religious buildings were converted to very different uses after they had been confiscated by the Crown during the 1540s. Smiles concludes his account with a discussion of architecture and ‘civic improvements’ in the Tudor south west, thus setting the stage for Susan Flavin’s impressive essay on change and development in the decorative arts, which follows next, and which, in many respects, forms the centrepiece of the entire collection. Flavin’s contribution is a detailed, wide-ranging and extremely well-informed study, containing a wealth of information about the decorative arts in Devon and Cornwall during the sixteenth century. The author’s account of the development of the Devon lace-making industry is especially interesting, as is her discussion of the working practices of the local goldsmiths, while she also pays welcome attention to many of the Tudor West Country’s neglected master craftsmen. Flavin pauses to consider the work of the Exeter mason Arnold Hamlyn, for example, who, in 1590–1, carved the effigy of Elizabeth i that adorned the public fountain known as the ‘Little Conduit’ in the city’s High Street: a public fountain which was itself supplied with water drawn from a former monastic aqueduct that had been appropriated by the citizens in the wake of the Dissolution – and was thus a product of that wider contemporary drive for civic improvement previously discussed by Smiles.

Flavin’s piece is succeeded by two short essays by Karen Hearn, the first giving a general overview of ‘Art in Britain between 1530 and 1620’ and the second providing a lively account of the Exeter miniature-painter, Nicholas Hilliard. (The pictures that accompany the latter piece are particularly exquisite.) Stephanie Pratt then considers maritime activity and exploration from a West Country point of view, tracing the journeys made by local seafarers such as Sir John Hawkins, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Sir Richard Grenville from the Devon and Cornish ports to the wider world beyond. Again, the images illustrating this piece are very striking, not least the drawings of tattooed Algonquian Indians made by the Cornish gentleman John White, who, in 1585, accompanied Grenville on his voyage to Roanoke, Virginia (a plantation which, Pratt reminds us, was originally named in honour of the ‘Virgin Queen’). Presumably White himself would have regarded his subjects’ bodily adornments as highly exotic, but today – when tattoos add to the gaiety of life on every West Country street – his depictions of these blue-inked individuals may be said to possess a strangely contemporary resonance. The collection concludes with another short essay by Smiles, this time on the subject of education and learning, followed by a ‘Who’s Who’ of the many individuals associated with Devon and Cornwall who are mentioned in the exhibition catalogue and a helpful list of suggestions for further reading. Inevitably, a book of this size can only cover so much ground, and while affairs in Devon in general – and in Exeter in particular – receive a great deal of attention, affairs in Cornwall receive considerably less. Cornwall’s distinctive ethnic identity, moreover, still so very evident throughout the Tudor period, is not alluded to at all: a rather surprising omission. It would be unfair to conclude this review on a note of criticism, however, for most readers will surely agree that – like the exhibition on which it is based – West Country to World’s End affords a series of fine perspectives on the endlessly fascinating world of the Tudor south west.