Old English Scholarship in the Seventeenth Century explores the work of five antiquaries of the 1620s through the 1650s and concludes with an epilogue juxtaposing Milton's Paradise Regained (1671) with the Old English Christ and Satan. Situating her scholars within the political and religious upheavals that led to and underpinned the British Civil Wars, Brackmann argues that their own inclinations, ranging from Puritan to Laudian and from Parliamentarian to Royalist, not only shaped their approaches to medieval texts and monuments but also propelled them to deploy their researches in service of contemporary causes. While the book mostly addresses published writings, it includes several cameo passages in which Brackmann discusses revealing manuscript sources. Nevertheless, there are significant shortcomings that counteract some of the book's most assertive observations.

Brackmann's five scholars are Simonds D'Ewes, Abraham Wheelock, Roger Twysden, William Somner, and William Dugdale. Alone among them, D'Ewes published nothing of his Old English endeavors. Brackmann focuses on three aspects of his work: his study of William Lambarde's Archaionomia (1568) which, with its editions of many of the earliest English law codes, undergirded numerous seventeenth-century discussions of the bases of English civil law; D'Ewes's goals in confecting a single volume (British Library, Harley MS 624) out of materials drawn from a twelfth-century Passional (previously John Dee's) and texts on early British and fourteenth-century English history; and his efforts to compile an Old English dictionary. She enriches her account of D'Ewes's interactions with Archaionomia through her evaluation of the impact upon him of the handwritten notes, probably the work of Thomas Bowyer, to be found in D'Ewes's own copy of Lambarde's work (now British Library, Additional MS 11750).

Chapters 2 and 3 respectively center on the Old English and Latin edition of Bede's Ecclesiastical History published by Wheelock in 1643 and on the 1644 second edition of Lambarde's Archaionomia, which incorporated additional materials suggested and in part prepared by Twysden. Detecting Puritan leanings in Wheelock's choice of Old English homiletic passages to illustrate the substantial notes to his edition, Brackmann situates Wheelock's work within the ideological ferment among Calvinists and Arminians that characterized Cambridge through the 1630s and early 1640s. Her treatment of the 1644 Archaionomia highlights how the added materials—an Old English text on betrothal and marriage, Wulfstan's Canons of Edgar, Ælfric's pastoral letter for Bishop Wulfsige, the (spurious) laws of William the Conqueror, and Twysden's edition of the Leges Henrici primi—would have resonated with contemporary issues. Her discussion of the notes that Twysden entered in his own copy of the publication, now in the library at Nostell Priory, Yorkshire, prompts her conclusion that Twysden projected a further, revised edition.

The first of two chapters dedicated to Somner establishes his Laudian and royalist credentials by evaluating the descriptions of medieval monuments in his Antiquities of Canterbury of 1640 and his composition of two poems prompted by the regicide of 1649. Somner's Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum (1659) is covered in chapter 5. Based on D'Ewes's work, the landmark publication nevertheless incorporates significant original research. Brackmann analyzes entries for which the headwords were furnished by the poem Daniel and the medical texts Bald's Leechbook and Leechbook III, which Somner was the first to study intensively, and argues that his choice of passages to illustrate the headwords reflected his political and religious sympathies. Her comparison of Somner's two manuscript drafts of the Dictionarium (Canterbury Cathedral Archives, MSS Lit. C. 9 and Lit. C. 10) leads to her underscoring the interplay she detects between Somner's scholarship and his concern to promote conservative values through the dictionary's detailed content.

Somner's royalist affinities were shared by William Dugdale, whose Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656) provides the focus for the book's sixth chapter. Dugdale's richly illustrated topographical history of his home county handles the pre- and post-Conquest periods differently: the scarcity of documentary and material evidence for the earlier period allowed Dugdale to treat it, Brackmann contends, as an imaginative space that he could populate with characteristics and values offering a message for his own time, much as contemporary film coopts medieval themes to comment on current issues. She bases her case on an examination of Dugdale's treatment of Guy of Warwick, King Athelstan's legendary thegn who, according to Old French and Middle English romances, defeated a Viking champion in a battle to determine the fate of the English throne. In her epilogue, rather than addressing the well-worn theme of Paradise Lost's potential debt to the Old English biblical poems of the Junius manuscript, Brackmann pursues an arresting investigation of common themes of leadership and spiritual insight that seventeenth-century readers could have identified in the Old English Christ and Satan (available in print from 1655) and Milton's Paradise Regained, both of which foreground the fall of the rebel angels and the temptation of Christ. Her discussion here supports her central thesis that seventeenth-century antiquarian studies served as a cultural agent engaging deeply with contemporary preoccupations.

Notwithstanding the book's numerous strengths, readers must be alerted to some substantial problems. The single point made most insistently, that D'Ewes funded the Cambridge lectureship in Old English held by Wheelock (repeated on ten different pages), is quite unfounded: Wheelock's correspondence and the preface to Somner's Dictionarium establish that the position was created on Sir Henry Spelman's initiative alone, with Spelman's grandson redirecting the funds to Somner following Wheelock's death. The suggestion (p. 72) that D'Ewes supplied Twysden with a copy of Lambarde's 1568 Archaionomia for the preparation of the 1644 edition is belied by Wheelock's preface to that edition, where he notes that it was based on John Selden's copy, which carried annotations by Lambarde himself; this copy finally became Twysden's on Selden's death in 1654. The book's numerous Latin quotations and translations are disturbingly unreliable: quotations may include as many as half a dozen typographical errors; single words, verb tenses, phrases, and idiomatic expressions are frequently mistranslated in ways that materially impact Brackmann's argument. To take a single example, she launches her case for Wheelock's valuation of preaching above sacraments by quoting a passage in which Wheelock's precandi (“of praying”) is misunderstood as predicandi (“of preaching”) (p. 64). It is a great shame that an otherwise engrossing monograph is marred by errors that cast doubts on the book's reliability.