Overview

This book takes an innovative approach to the study of the past in the past. It seeks to understand history, not as a discipline or profession, but as a cultural phenomenon. Spanning the early-modern and modern pasts, this book focuses on the posthumous reputation of the ancient warrior queen Boudica, using the example of this ever-popular figure to explore the varied field of historical culture in Britain, from seventeenth-century antiquarianism to early twentieth-century film. While providing contemporary contextual readings of Boudica’s representations, the book’s primary purpose is to explore the unique nature of historical ideas as durable cultural phenomena. It argues that long before professional historians sought to regularize historical practice, audiences encountered visions of past ages created by antiquaries, playwrights, poets, novelists, and artists, all of which engaged with, articulated, and even defined ‘historical truth’. These individual depictions, variable audience reactions, and the abiding notion of history as truth constitute the substance of historical culture.

Full Product Details

9780197904404

Table of Contents

Reviews

[Vandrei's] dissections of historical practices contained within are attentive not only to language, form, and visual culture, but also to every contingency and circumstance surrounding the construction of Boudican historical products. That this is achieved so skillfully across such a vast chronological canvas is worthy of significant admiration...a superb book that offers an enormous amount to think with for scholars of Britain, and of history. * Laura Carter, University of Cambridge * Vandrei's impressively wide research into the evolving, fractured, and often contradictory expressions of British historical culture takes in written histories, poetry, stage plays, historical fiction and pageants; emotion, religion, nationalism, and politics; notions of femininity; imagined portraits of Boudica, from the woodcut in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles (1577) to Thomas Thornycroft's bronze statue of her on Westminster Bridge; fittingly named ships in the Royal Navy; and a 1929 film. The text is supported by illustrations, footnotes, an extensive bibliography, and an index. * CHOICE *

Author Information

Martha Vandrei is Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Exeter. This is her first book.

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