John Stow worked at an important moment in the development of historiography and was one of the key figures in the transition from medieval to modern modes of inquiry. He is best remembered for his topographical A Survey of London (1598), which supports his modern reputation as a dedicated and painstaking amateur scholar whose heightened sense of historical accuracy was instrumental in setting modern historiography upon its course. However, this book was a last work, a masterpiece, composed at the end of a distinguished fifty-year career in the collection and study of English antiquities during which Stow produced several other large historical compilations in the popular form of chronicles and annals. These earlier books are, for the most part, traditional in form and content; they reproduce without challenge the accepted myths of national origin, such as the founding of Britain by survivors of the Trojan War. But Stow's later...