Two gun massacres that occurred in the United Kingdom during the late twentieth century prompted Lois Schwoerer to research people's views of guns in early modern England. In an era when mass shootings occur weekly in the United States and gun rights are at the forefront of political debates, her work is especially timely. Schwoerer, professor emerita of history at George Washington University and scholar-in-residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library, avoids the widely studied military gun culture of England and instead focuses on the domestic gun culture that developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Hers is the first comprehensive analysis of early modern England's civilian gun culture, but it is more than that. It is the story of a new technology gaining acceptance that begs the reader to ask larger questions about the connections among firearms, legislation, and crime.

The most impressive aspect of Schwoerer's study is the depth and quality of source materials that she examines to prove the pervasiveness of guns in England. Visual sources like the famed Agas Map of the early 1560s are a favorite for scholars of Elizabethan London, but no one to my knowledge has cited it as a basis for the popularity of guns. Schwoerer points out that gunmaking is the only industry depicted in multiple places on the map, even though firearms were relatively new to England at the time. The material sources that she surveys range from toy cannons unearthed from the River Thames to the Pasfield Jewel, a seventeenth-century emerald-encrusted toiletry case shaped like a wheel-lock pistol. Firearms mentioned in poems and plays make it clear that they were en vogue.

Though today's American gun culture receives more attention from scholars, Schwoerer disunites American and English gun culture while proving the relevance of the latter by comparing gun legislation from each place. She deftly traces the controversy surrounding Article VII of the English Bill of Rights (1689), which stipulates that “Protestant Subjects may have Armes for their defence Suitable to their Condition and as allowed by law.” Unlike the more liberal (and more controversial) Second Amendment to the United States Constitution that guarantees “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,” England limited gun ownership by religious affiliation and economic standing. Only the wealthiest 2 percent of English subjects could legally possess firearms, leading Schwoerer to cast doubt on the long-held belief that the Second Amendment resulted from Article VII, conferred a century earlier.

Schwoerer also impresses by determining how guns affected women and children, since hunting, soldiering, and gun use in general were male prerogatives in early modern England. She discovered that widows of gunmakers often took over for their deceased husbands, and they were on equal footing with male members of the Gunmakers' Company. In the home women were advised to use gunpowder to ward off bugs, season meat, and cure toothaches. Gunsmiths even accommodated their female clients by producing lightweight versions of their products, though this occurred mainly on the Continent. A striking example from this section, which shows Schwoerer's dexterity with early modern symbolism, is her detailed description of the portrait of Lady Teresia Sherley (1590–1688), one of the few depictions of an Englishwoman holding a gun. Portraits of gun-wielding aristocratic children, some as young as two years old, show that English youth were exposed to guns as well. They learned about firearms by using them and by playing with toy guns and cannons that could be fired, the most common of all early modern English toys.

Yet the distinctions that Schwoerer draws regarding gun use among men, women, and children, combined with the book's rigid structure, leads to some repetition. Gun accidents and crimes against men, women, and children are covered in successive chapters (7, 8, and 9), but the conclusions drawn in each instance are similar. The new invention certainly influenced each of these groups, but it matters little if the victim of a misfire was a sixteen-year-old boy or a twenty-year-old man. These topics might have been discussed together, though they certainly prove that guns were commonplace among various demographics. Schwoerer also understates the significant backlash that Elizabethan gun advocates faced from authors who remained steadfast in their support of the longbow, England's traditional weapon of choice. She cites Sir John Smythe's Certain Discourses Military (1590) as a pro-bow tract, but seasoned soldiers like Sir Henry Knyvett and Thomas Churchyard, along with mathematician Thomas Digges, also argued that longbows were more effective than guns. Even if these writers were more concerned with the military matters that Schwoerer intended to avoid in her book, the fact that guns were loud, heavy, inaccurate, expensive, and slow to fire in comparison to longbows also would have influenced civilian buyers. Clarifying in greater detail the process by which guns overcame the well-entrenched bow would have further strengthened an already well-supported thesis.

One of the clearest indications of a nation's gun culture are its weapons-related laws and statutes. Within a century of their introduction in England, Henry VIII outlawed concealed firearms due to a spate of high-profile murders. In 1548 his son Edward VI devised a registration system stipulating who was qualified to use guns, which “highlights the government's desire to strengthen its control over who was qualified to shoot” (49). The modern British gun massacres that gained Schwoerer's attention similarly convinced the British government to enact the 1988 and 1997 Firearms (Amendment) Acts that banned several types of guns in the United Kingdom excepting Northern Ireland. The United States soon may follow suit, as the nation is plagued by the same gun accidents, suicides, crimes, murders, assassinations, and mass shootings that arose in England five centuries ago. By elucidating this troubled history, by making such connections across time and space, and by asking the big questions, Schwoerer has crafted the definitive work on civilian gun culture in early modern England.