ABSTRACT
We may begin by observing that images of this type are conspicuous by their virtual absence from the earliest works of antiquarian scholarship to be printed in England. The ‘descriptions’ of the topography and history of their local counties undertaken by Tudor and early Stuart chorographers from John Leland onwards were largely verbal evocations: following the conventions of a discourse that was at root rhetorical, these ‘surveys’, ‘perambulations’ and ‘itineraries’ relied upon the power of words to evoke the historic sites to which they referred.5 As William Stukeley commented in 1724, such ‘embellishments’ were ‘the chief desiderata’ of the works of sixteenth-and early seventeenthcentury antiquaries, ‘whose pens were not so ready to deliver their sentiments in lines as letters’.6 This was partly, I would argue, a consequence of a climate of opinion created by the Reformation itself.
