Choosing a cover image for a book is tricky, especially on an early modern subject. Ideally, the image should relate both to the title and contents of the book and be available on one of the standard image sites. Since my book is entitled The English Republican Exiles in Europe During the Restoration, I should have selected an image showing the three republicans it focuses on.
Alas, while there are contemporary representations of both Algernon Sidney (1623-1683) and Edmund Ludlow (1617-1692), I yet have not come across a likeness of Henry Neville (1619-1694), nevermind an image showing all three of them at once. Therefore, not even a collage would have been an option.
Next I thought I might go for a map of Europe. I love maps of all kinds, especially early modern ones. But there were already too many other books with maps of Europe on their cover, and the book after all was not about Europe, but about people travelling it. I wanted something more lively, more dynamic which showed real human beings in action.
So I started looking for images of early modern travel, ideally showing travellers on horseback or travellers in cities. These images existed, but they often showed the wrong country, wrong city or wrong landscape. Somehow, the context was always wrong. The same was true for city maps, and they only ever showed once city at a time – Geneva, Rotterdam, Paris, Rome – when I wanted to show them all at once.
In the end, I struck on an image that fulfilled most of my criteria. It is a black-and-white image showing a coaching inn in seventeenth-century Augsburg. In front of the inn is a coach and horses, while several men on horseback are arriving from the left. Other men are nearby resting on a fence or barrier or probably just stretching their legs.
I like to imagine that one of the men in the image could have been Algernon Sidney stopping over on his way to Augsburg, where he stayed in 1664, presumably visiting the former lord chief justice Oliver St. John, who had withdrawn to the city following the Restoration. Maybe, just maybe, Sidney could have known that inn.
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