Overview

The Mirror for Magistrates, the collection of de casibus complaint poems in the voices of medieval rulers and rebels compiled by William Baldwin in the 1550s, was central to the development of imaginative literature in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Additions by John Higgins, Thomas Blenerhasset, and Richard Niccols between 1574 and 1610 extended the Mirror's scope, shifted its focus, and prolonged its popularity; in particular, the texts' later manifestations profoundly influenced the work of Spenser and Shakespeare. Unperfect Histories is the first monograph to consider the text's early modern transmission history as a whole. In chapters on Baldwin, Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's complaint collections, it demonstrates that the Mirror is an invaluable witness to how verse history was conceptualized, written, and read across the period, and explores the ways in which it was repeatedly reinterpreted and redeployed in response to changing contemporary concerns. The Mirror corpus encompasses topical allegory, nationalist polemic, and historiographical skepticism, as well as the macabre humour and metatextual play which have come to be known as hallmarks of Baldwin's mid-Tudor writings. What has not been recognised is the complex interaction of these themes and techniques right across the Mirror's history. Higgins, Blenerhasset, and Niccols's contributions are analysed for the first time here, both within their own literary and historiographical contexts, and in dialogue with Baldwin's early editions. This new reading offers a lively account of the texts' depth and variety, and provides insight into the extent of the Mirror's influence and ubiquity in early modern literary culture.

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9780198806172

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Unperfect Histories not only provides a long-overdue corrective to the ways in which literary critics treat the later editions of the Mirror, but makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century historiography and intellectual culture. * Kit Heyam, University of Leeds, The Seventeenth Century * it will remain a reference work for two reasons. It reports on a text adapted to the expediencies of Tudor and Jacobean statecraft; anyone concerned with nationalism, religion, identity, narrative, and government in early modern England will find it a useful starting point. It is also a guide to what writers in Britain and beyond said on those subjects at the beginning of this century, where their views are on occasion perhaps just as shifting and inconsistent as anything thought up in the age of Burghley and Bacon. * Andrew Breeze, Modern Language Review *

Unperfect Histories not only provides a long-overdue corrective to the ways in which literary critics treat the later editions of the Mirror, but makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century historiography and intellectual culture. * Kit Heyam, University of Leeds, The Seventeenth Century *

Unperfect Histories not only provides a long-overdue corrective to the ways in which literary critics treat the later editions of the Mirror, but makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century historiography and intellectual culture. * Kit Heyam, University of Leeds, The Seventeenth Century * it will remain a reference work for two reasons. It reports on a text adapted to the expediencies of Tudor and Jacobean statecraft; anyone concerned with nationalism, religion, identity, narrative, and government in early modern England will find it a useful starting point. It is also a guide to what writers in Britain and beyond said on those subjects at the beginning of this century, where their views are on occasion perhaps just as shifting and inconsistent as anything thought up in the age of Burghley and Bacon. * Andrew Breeze, Modern Language Review * This book demonstrates how subsequent contributions to (and appropriations of) the de casibus corpus reframe Baldwin's mistrust of chronicle history in their own vibrant, divergent terms, to encompass anxieties around national identity, poetic invention, and literary-political ethics. * Harriet Archer, The English Association *

Author Information

Harriet Archer received her doctorate in early modern English literature from the University of Oxford, and held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Newcastle University. She is the co-editor, with Andrew Hadfield, of A Mirror for Magistrates in Context: Literature, History, and Politics in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and with Paul Frazer of a critical edition of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorboduc for the Manchester Revels Plays Series. She is currently Lecturer at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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