Well before the Elizabethan era the exchange of gifts at New Year’s had become a well-acknowledged custom among members of the English court circle and between them and those who frequented its outskirts. Such gifts served as expressions of loyalty and gratitude, provided social bonding and recognition, and observed the intricacies of social structure by marking the social standing of particular people in relation to others. Gifts to and from the queen herself were naturally the most numerous on these occasions, and involved the highest stakes of recognition and reward. While the act of gift giving itself in early modern English society has long received substantial attention, supporting source material has not been as comprehensibly or readily accessible as it might have been. That has all changed now with the welcome publication of Jane A. Lawson’s large, laudable, and meticulously detailed edition of the New Year’s gift exchanges of Elizabeth I.

The transcription of the twenty-four surviving gift rolls in their entirety, plus one that Lawson has reconstructed, all drawn from eleven libraries and archives, forms the core of the work at hand. These rolls record the actions of 1,200 people giving ca. 4,000 gifts to the queen and receiving ca. 4,800 from her in not quite half the New Years’ of her reign. Potentially overwhelming on its own, Lawson has arduously provided well-conceived strategies of access for the reader, thus considerably enhancing the research value of the texts in several ways. Following a bibliography of secondary sources employed in the very useful explanatory introduction, these take the form of five analytic appendixes over 200 additional pages. The first offers an index to the gifts and motifs themselves. This exhaustive finding aid requires a glossary of terms, and that turns up as the second appendix. The third consists of a detailed list of all the offices and tradesmen of the royal household along with a list of their incumbents: a virtual Gray’s Anatomy of the household extending right down, for example, to the queen’s laundress, the sergeant of the bears, and the yeoman of the pitcher house. Some gifts were given directly to the queen in person, but many others were left for her with a member of her household. Appendix 4 lists by name and office those who served as custodians of gifts given in this way. The last, longest, and most heroically compiled appendix consists of biographical sketches of all those 1,200 or so individuals mentioned in the gift transactions, along with heavily abbreviated documentation for each name. Such sketches are necessarily succinct, and many of the names could also be found in other reference works. But a great many others have been too obscure to have appeared elsewhere in print. This, like most of the other appendixes, represents a scholarly compilation that could well stand as a valuable reference source on its own.

The overall value of this contribution for those engaged in the study of gift giving itself is obvious. But its value to other researchers is both varied in nature and almost inestimable in application. The core evidence offers the political historian a useful gauge of one’s political standing at court, marked by the appearance and value of gifts given to and received by the queen over time. Those concerned with patterns of consumption and of fashion, or with material culture in general, may now easily chart the appearance and disappearance of particular classes of objects and of their monetary value over time. Social historians will be intrigued to learn just how far down into the social structure such gift giving could occur. Connoisseurs may even find here a means of tracing the provenance of particular objets d’art.

In sum, Lawson’s obviously extensive, exacting, and patient efforts of many years’ duration have produced a volume whose numerous wonders generously repay her perseverance. She has presented a lavish gift of her own to all who work on this era — one that should be stocked on the reference shelf of any serious research library appropriate to the subject.