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A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation (Hardcover)
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A Mirror for Magistrates and the Politics of the English Reformation (Hardcover)
Series: Massachusetts Studies in Early Modern Culture
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This work offers a bold reassessment of a major work of
sixteenth-century English literature. Perhaps no other work of
secular poetry was as widely read in Tudor England as the
historical verse tragedy collection ""A Mirror for Magistrates"".
For over sixty years (1559-1621), this compendium of monologues
presented in the voices of fallen political figures from England's
past remained almost constantly in print, offering both exemplary
warnings to English rulers and inspiring models for literary
authors, including Spenser and Shakespeare. In a striking departure
from previous scholarship, Scott Lucas shows that modern critics
have misconstrued the purpose of the tragic verse narratives of the
Mirror, approaching them primarily as uncontroversial meditations
on abstract political and philosophical doctrines. Lucas revises
this view, revealing many of the Mirror tragedies to be works
topically applicable in form and politically contentious in nature.
Lucas returns the earliest poems of ""A Mirror for Magistrates"" to
the troubled context of their production, the tumultuous reign of
the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558). As Protestants suffering from
the traumatic collapse of King Edward VI's 'godly' rule (1547-1553)
and from the current policies of Mary's government, the Mirror
authors radically reshaped their poem's historical sources in order
to craft emotionally moving narratives designed to provide models
for interpreting the political failures of Edward VI's reign and to
offer urgent warnings to Marian magistrates. Lucas' study also
reveals how, in later poems, the Mirror authors issued oblique
appeals to Queen Elizabeth's officers, boldly demanding that they
allow the realm of 'the literary' to stand as an unfettered
discursive arena of public controversy. Lucas thus provides a
provocative new approach to this seminal but long-misunderstood
collection, one that restores the Mirror to its rightful place as
one of the greatest works of sixteenth-century English political
literature.
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