Noah Millstone’s outstanding work supplies an invaluable survey of scribal pamphleteering during the Stuart era and provides rich new insights concerning the significance of their circulation. Chronicling a history of revisionist and postrevisionist scholarship concerning Stuart history, and drawing upon critical trends such as political culture, Millstone establishes a multivalent perspective on politics that differs depending upon the circumstances; he develops a definition of political awareness that ties to the necessity of the Stuart monarchy to implement mechanisms of participation and collaboration in order to function. The book consistently demonstrates meticulous attention to the material conditions of manuscripts and their distribution with an eye to “questions of publicity, perception, and state formation” (16).

Part 1 examines the objects of study and their complex histories by beginning with the evidence available concerning manuscript production as well as the tacit systems that allowed these documents to be made and circulated. Millstone thus focuses on the figures of the scrivener and the antiquarian, thereby investigating the material circumstances in which the manuscripts were created and the manner by which they were read, valued, and stored. This segment of the book also frames the historical backdrop regarding the relation between the monarch and Parliament, which preoccupies the remainder of the book. As Millstone aptly observes, James’s need to cultivate and retain an economy of love between himself and the English people, represented through Parliament, meant that an image of unity was necessary in order to preserve his power. However, he acknowledges that this pleasant image of dialogue was in reality established and compromised through parliamentary separates, manuscripts that were either formal orations from the monarch, collective statements, or individual speeches. Throughout this incredibly informative section, of which this review only offers some highlights, Millstone demonstrates rigorous and deft analysis of the circumstances of production and the contents of the manuscripts, but he also carefully pays attention to the data he collects on these texts, specifying their limitations and identifying the misleading nature of the visual charts and graphs he incorporates in order to guide his readers toward more plausible and apt conclusions.

Following this informative historical inquiry, Millstone provides equally valuable applications of this backdrop to several case studies. By examining the tensions between and fluctuating fortunes of Bristol and Buckingham during and following the Spanish Match, Millstone elucidates the ways in which each used the other as a foil during times of political vulnerability in order to resuscitate his favorable image. Circulating manuscripts allowed them to reveal secret plots the other had ostensibly devised, and Millstone identifies the manner by which readers’ interpretations of these allowed them to develop and predict a history of what would or could happen in relation to what had happened or was presently occurring. Modeling himself after admired historians like Tacitus, William Drake, for example, “wished to be accounted a man wise in the ways in the world, a sophisticate or politic” (179). Hence, in Stuart England, “the world of events was a meaningful system of signs” that was available for manuscript readers to decipher in order to develop political awareness (192).

The third part of the book chronicles the riddled history of Parliament during Charles I’s reign, exposing the ways in which the Crown turned to means such as ship money in order to expedite military endeavors without needing to summon Parliament, and the manner in which Parliament regained control by characterizing members of the monarch’s circle as evil counselors with wicked political schemes. Revisiting the matter of Charles’s personal rule, Millstone identifies the realities of the king’s need to appease the Parliament despite efforts to dismiss them as a pluralistic and chaotic body. As a result, we are left with a far more complex and detailed narrative of the events leading to civil unrest.

Millstone’s detailed inquiry into manuscripts and their circulation reconceives the ways in which readers became involved in political matters. By expertly addressing the manner by which “collectors and diarists treated the texts themselves as forming a … political history of their own times” (167), Millstone bestows us with a modern equivalent that will prove useful to scholars with an interest in Stuart politics, regardless of their discipline.