Book reviews

It would be hard to imagine two more different books about early modern queens.Susan James uses her meticulous historical research to identify Henry VIII's last wife as a significant 'player' of power politics.Something of her agenda and methodology can be deduced from the fact that Sir Geoffrey Elton speaks, seemingly from beyond the grave, to add his praise to the chorus of plaudits provided on the dust jacket.Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, in contrast, classifies her work as a 'critical romance'.She provides a historically-nuanced account both of the unfortunate Scottish queen's career and the political circumstances that led to her downfall, but her concerns are with myth rather than history.Herself a literary critic, she uses historical as well as literary sources to illuminate the 'long ... love affair' between Mary Stuart and the nation that, over the period she covers, comes to be, in essence as well as in name, 'Britain'.In their different ways, both books testify to the fascination with and reinvestigation of early modern queens and queenship that has grown out of the study of women's and gender history over the past twenty years.Although James's main focus is on the figure of Kateryn Parr herself, she devotes considerable attention to Kateryn's family: her mother, her brother William Parr, Marquis of Northampton, and her younger sister Anne, who became the Countess of Pembroke.She argues, quite rightly, that because families loomed so large in Tudor culture, we cannot fully understand figures like Kateryn unless we attend to their functionings and ramifications in more than a perfunctory way.Indeed, part of her case for Kateryn's political significance rests on her relations with an extensive 'family' that included not only these blood members but, by adoption or affinity, Henry VIII's children and Lady Jane Grey.More generally, James's account gives us a woman who, despite being sacrificed on the altar of marriage three times (she chose to marry her fourth husband, Thomas Seymour), was, from her earliest days, an autonomous, and a politically effective, agent.She ensured that the royal bastards Mary and Elizabeth were restored to the succession, acted as Regent-General during Henry VIII's absence in France, and provided a model of 'androgynous' monarchical authority for her watchful stepdaughter, Elizabeth Tudor.James writes clearly, conveying a real sense of engagement with the people and events she describes.As a result, her book is very accessible, despite its length.There are weaknesses.Despite her emphasis on the significance of family to Tudor culture and to Kateryn Parr's career in particular, she does not theorise the family or its functioning.We are left to draw the unexceptionable conclusion that in the sixteenth century, as in any other period, people were likely to prefer and support those whom they considered to be members of their family, regardless of what they may have seen as their personal weaknesses.Nor does James devote any attention to the ways in which literary products might 'reflect' their creator's beliefs and experiences.This is particularly troubling given her strategy of interpreting Parr's religious writings as self-consciously autobiographical commentary.These lacunae raise a further issue, concerning Kateryn Parr's agency.James asserts that she was a 'player', even at points devising and initiating crown policy.But her narrative tells a different story: of a woman who tried to do her duty as a Christian within existing power structures (including, most saliently), marriage, and who did not question that this should be so.Moreover, this was a woman who, when it counted -when Henry VIII was on his deathbed -was denied the status of regent; possibly by Henry himself (in what James calls, in an unexplained aside, his 'last bitter gift' to his wife) or by a coterie of his trusted advisers.In either case, James provides ample evidence that Kateryn's life, and her political involvement, were more complicated by her status as an early modern woman than she acknowledges.In contrast, Lewis's book on Mary Queen of Scots brings intricacies of family and gender centre stage, using the career of the image of Mary Queen of Scots after her execution to illuminate processes by which modern Britain came into being.Lewis argues that the 'fiction of Britain' was centred in important ways on mythic, and dialectically-related, interpretations of the two queens who reigned at its initial prospect, Mary and Elizabeth.On this reading, 'Britain' -that congeries of independent territories which until recently masqueraded so successfully as an organic entity -was finally achieved during Queen Victoria's reign.This occurred once the 'nation's dream work' (articulated in works of art and literature) allowed a 'critical mass of Britons, Scottish and English' to accept and assimilate what Mary Queen of Scots had come to denote in the collective unconscious.Her perception that the sexualised, transgressive image of Mary Queen of Scots proved more indigestible than that of the virgin Elizabeth in a culture which 'could barely stomach female rule' explains Lewis's concentration on Mary, as it sets the scene for her status as a site of resistance to various hegemonies of the Stuart, Georgian and Victorian intervals that Lewis also explores.Lewis has written an imaginative and intellectually engaging cultural history.For the historian, it pays consistent dividends, particularly in highlighting the extent to which problems that defined Elizabethan political culture -centrally that of female rule -reverberated through a historical corridor that extended arguably until the

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