This book highlights a part of history called The Anglo-French Alliance, which is the name for the alliance between Great Britain and France between 1716 and 1731. It formed part of the stately quadrille in which the Great Powers of Europe repeatedly switched partners to try to build a superior alliance. Following the end of the War of the Spanish Succession by the Peace of Utrecht, British and French interests converged as they wished to stop the expansion of Spanish and Russian power. Although British Whig politicians had attacked the Peace of Utrecht under the slogan "No Peace Without Spain", given it seemingly placed Spain under French control, they soon developed close relations with Paris having returned to power following the Hanoverian succession. France faced an uncertain succession, as their king Louis XV was currently young and childless. Britain was wary of alienating the much-larger France. Negotiations led to the creation of the Anglo-French Alliance somewhere in late 1716.

Gesa Stedman's ambitious new study is a comprehensive account of cross-channel cultural exchanges between seventeenth-century France and England, and includes discussion of a wide range of sources and topics. Literary texts, garden design, fashion, music, dance, food, the book market, and the theatre as well as key historical figures feature in the book. Importantly, Stedman concentrates on the connection between actual, material transfer and its symbolic representation in both visual and textual sources, investigating material exchange processes in order to shed light on the connection between actual and symbolic exchange. Individual chapters discuss exchanges instigated by mediators such as Henrietta Maria and Charles II, and textual and visual representations of cultural exchange with France in poetry, restoration comedies, fashion discourse, and in literary devices and characters. Well-written and accessible, Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-Century France and England provides needed insight into the field of cultural exchange, and will be of interest to both literary scholars and cultural historians.