Though they belong to very different genres, both these books reflect the welcome development of a sophisticated literature considering the relationships between specific locations (towns, counties, regions) and their national cultures and polities. The ten essays in the Sweetinburgh collection, like the series Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to which it belongs, also reflect the welcome coming together of late medieval and early modern scholars to explore continuities, as well as changes, across the great early sixteenth-century divide. The same is much less true of the Smiles collection, a set of essays that acted as the catalogue to an exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. The cover portrait of Elizabeth offers a better guide to the periodization of this volume than its subtitle, as it deals overwhelmingly with the Elizabethan period, and largely with a familiar cast of southwesterners (Drake, Raleigh, Hawkins, Bodley, Gilberts, Hilliards, and Hookers) who contributed to post-Reformation changes in English nationhood and empire under Elizabeth (and James). Most of the essays are driven by the assumption that a distinctively new culture, and a new place for the southwest in that culture, was being created by the figures portrayed and discussed here, but they are generally too brief to test this assumption. Only Susan Flavin’s much longer essay (constituting 40 percent of the book) on the decorative arts directly addresses the question of “change and development in the sixteenth century.” Hers is also the only contribution to probe with any depth below the elite groupings connected with the court and to consider ordinary craftsmen and middling-sort consumers of the products like plate, lace, and plasterwork, and to identify the continuities in vernacular practice that shaped the reception of new (how new?) classical models, especially when local craftsmen used printed Continental guides. It is a pity that the chapters on art by Karen Hearn (one general, the other on the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard) and on education and learning by the editor do not explore the same questions, especially given Robert Tittler’s pioneering work on provincial portraiture or that of Orme, Clark, and others on church and monastic patronage of humanism before the Reformation.

By contrast, each essay in the Sweetinburgh collection provides a carefully theorized and researched local case study, helpfully contextualized by the editor’s introduction (replete with discussion of the main interdisciplinary influences on how historians theorize locality and identity) and an afterword by Caroline Barron that deftly summarizes the themes of the volume by considering how far they would apply to London, given its much greater size and political weight within its nation state than the majority of the towns studied. Primarily these towns are drawn from southern England (Bristol, Bury St. Edmunds, Canterbury, Dover, and Sandwich), but analyses of Osnabruck, Prague, and the towns of Holland justify the broader geographical claim of the title. All of the essays are of a high standard, successfully combining detailed archival research with interesting reflections on at least one aspect of how townspeople “negotiated the political,” acknowledging in every case the complex mixture of factors that could result in a particular set of developments in each place, yet also be recognizable as part of a wider trend in society.

The book is divided into two halves, the first offering “the view from the inside,” considering the dynamics of “urban politics, power and identity” as shaped and seen from within the particular town, while the second half offers “the view from the outside” largely through the prism of “relations between crown and town,” though, as in Peter Fleming’s study of medieval Bristol (much of it pre-1400), regional magnates form a vital third force within this relationship, as does the church in several other essays. No real attempt is made here to identify any overriding pattern, but a series of approaches and areas of common interest emerge, such as the part played by urban space: buildings like town halls, processions, and other ritual appropriations and jurisdictional disputes over suburbs, castles, church liberties, and other liminal parts of towns, which urban leaderships took every opportunity to bring under civic control through whatever partnerships they found necessary. Frederik Felskau’s study of Prague reveals the destabilizing impact of having two separate jurisdictions, the Old and New Towns, in a capital also constantly subject to religious and dynastic divisions, and hence too important to be left to settle its own internal power struggles. A compelling account of one such process is offered by Mark Merry’s essay on Bury St. Edmunds (long known as the center of a bitter struggle for civic emancipation from the power of its abbey), which explores with great sensitivity the role played by the merchant John Smyth and his bequests/memorialization in providing an “ideal type” of the civic leader through which the townspeople (or at least the wealthier sort) could both conceptualize in theory and also act out in practice (through their Candlemas Guild) their own vision of the community. His focus on the agency of the written record takes this collection into the territory so fruitfully explored for England by New Historicist literary scholars such as Malcolm Richardson and Adrian Gordon on London or John Adrian’s Local Negotiations of English Nationhood 1570–1680 (2011), whose cover map of Kent features three of the towns studied here.

One of the beneficial aspects of the new pressures to demonstrate impact and partnership work in British universities is that closer ties are being forged with heritage bodies and others to explore local consciousnesses and exploit local archives and material cultures, while addressing the big questions of cultural and political change. The RAMM exhibition, while a welcome sign of the potential of such ties, also demonstrates the problems that can arise when one falls back on the familiar objects that illustrate the familiar story, rather than delving deeper into the archives and the collection stores to bring out the less standard items. How to find ways to capture the complexities of “negotiating the political” in its true complexity in public histories, as well as in academic essay collections, is a challenge facing us all.