272 Reviews institutions,and practices [. . .] available to her' (p. 2).More is familiar here than the characteristic coupling of active and passive verbs.Montrose often relies on the usual suspects: JohnKnox and John Aylmer, stuck in a literaryhistorical version of Inferno, forever launching the same passages at one another; or Puttenham, whose definition of allegory has long been aMontrose favourite.By divesting thequeen of control, and by dismissing thepossibility that she functioned as an exemplar,Montrose habitually shifts attention toElizabeth's male subjects. His insistence that the queen was 'asmuch the creature of theElizabethan image as itscreator' (p. 3) can be repetitiveand dispiriting; and his arguments, by curtailing her agency, possibly extend the 'venerable traditionof misogyny' thathe identifiesas a dominant mode of resistance against Elizabeth (p. I7I). That said, Montrose's 'Elizabethan political imaginary' 'the collective corpus of images, tropes,and other verbal and iconic resources' thatshaped 'royal representation' (p. 3) does remain a useful concept. While the book's thesis holds few surprises, individual readings provide delight. Montrose offers skilled analyses of Elizabethan 'visual culture': royal progresses and appearances; officialand unofficialportraitsof thequeen and her courtiers; conventions of visual representation; anecdotes about lost artefacts, and so on. In contrast toRoy Strong,who cast the 'Cult of Elizabeth' as a consolidation of royal power,Montrose stresses that it was not 'a unified and coherent systembut ratherwas hybrid and impro visatory', effectively manipulated fromabove and frombelow (p. IO4).He works through Elizabeth's lifechronologically, examining the 'participants' who entered in a 'poten tially dangerous negotiation of symbolic power' with the royal image (p. I85), and trackingchanges in this image over time. In theprocess,Montrose extends his analysis well beyond the confines of England and of Elizabeth's reign.His assertion that Mary Tudor constitutes a 'uniquely relevant precedent' forElizabeth (p. 56) is especially welcome, even ifhe fails to consider thatprecedent fully(the rape tropes thathe asso ciateswith a possible Spanish invasion, forexample, circulated at the timeof theSpanish marriage). Many chapters like theone on propagandistic uses of Elizabeth's iconog raphy in theLow Countries during the I58os draw attention topreviously overlooked evidence. And the final section, on Elizabeth as 'Time's Subject', which examines 'the late Elizabethan theme of mundus senescit and all that it implied about the disenchant ment of theoldQueen's subjects' (p. 24I), isenabling scholarship of thebest kind; among other things,itshould prompt a re-evaluation of contemporary representations of aging women. The SubjectofElizabeth covers familiar territory. It nevertheless remains a rarepleasure tonavigate thecomplexities of Elizabethan political culturewith so expert and eloquent a guide. UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS JACQUELINE VANHOUTTE Donne: The Reformed Soul. ByJoHN STUBBS.London: Viking. 2006. xxvi + 565 pp. C25. ISBN:978--o670-91510-I John Stubbs begins with a claim thatplaces him in a line of descent fromDonne's first biographer, IsaakWalton: 'His biography isworth studyingnot only because he was a YES, 38.I & 2, 2008 273 splendid writer,but also because he was a brave and principled man' (p .xxv). Walton's Donne isa typeof the reformed sinner: a writer whose laterworks and actions atone for the 'follies' of his youth, whether thesewere marrying the daughter of a social superior or writing erotic poetry. As Stubbs makes clear, themodern biographer inevitablyworks in the shadow ofWalton's master narrative, criticallyweighing his evidence and revising his interpretation; as Stubbs cautions, 'For all itscharm and fondness, thereare certain regions and intensitiesof feeling [Walton's] Life simplyavoids' (p. 464). Nevertheless, the sense of the exemplary character of Donne's lifeand work connects Stubbs with his great predecessor. Stubbs's biography isfurther marked by itsdebts to two modern biographical studies, R. C. Bald'sjohn Donne:A Life (1970)andJohn Carey'sjohn Donne: Life, Mind andArt(Ig8I). Stubbs reliesheavily on Bald's primary research and documentation, while his interpre tationof Donne's spiritual dilemma is inflectedby Carey's emphasis on apostasy as a psychological leitmotif thatunderpins Donne's art. Stubbs gives a comprehensive sense of thedouble theological and political bind on English Catholics, and then advances a less conflicted reading of Donne's crisis of faith than Carey. As his title indicates, Stubbs's Donne is a 'reformed soul': a man who became at ease with an Anglicanism he initiallyadopted for more...