SCOTT C. LUCAS. A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation.

Abstract

The last 10 or 15 years have seen a remarkable revival of interest in A Mirror for Magistrates. Not only have we seen more and more essays and articles on this text, but there has been a general movement away from the old critical habit of treating it as a useful repository of moral and political platitudes to be recruited as illustrations of later and greater work, especially Shakespeare’s history plays. Recent studies of the Mirror have been much more concerned with it as a text worth analysing in its own right, and Scott Lucas has tirelessly championed the significance of the Mirror as a monument of Tudor political literature since the mid-1990s. The volume under review represents the summa of his research—and it will without doubt be the foundation of further work on the Mirror for the near and medium future. Anyone with a serious interest in the relationship between politics and poetry in the sixteenth century—not just the Mirror itself—will have to come to terms with this book, and it will be fascinating to record the responses to what will certainly turn out to be a high-impact monograph.