Just when a little new life is apparently being breathed at last into the long-stymied ecumenical movement in the western Church, Queen Mary i of England, Ireland and France is receiving another serious look from historians. There have been a spate of new biographies and a series of collective volumes, many of the latter concentrating on the vital religious aspects of Mary's reign, her marriage to Philip, prince of Spain and king of England, and the achievement of her cousin and archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole. This new collection, carefully edited by Susan Doran and Thomas Freeman, who both contribute significantly to it in their own right, makes no pretence to be a biography of Queen Mary (still somewhat disparaged here as ‘Mary Tudor’) or a history of her reign. Instead, it delves into many important aspects of Mary's life and reign, seen first from the old perspective of the English Protestant and Whig interpretation, and then from the new one of current research. Particularly valuable is the stress on how Mary and her actions were treated during the much longer, and generally much better regarded, reign of her younger half-sister, Anne Boleyn's daughter Elizabeth. Susan Doran focuses most interestingly on this aspect, while Victor Houliston and the late William Wizeman stress the Catholicism which was so essential to Mary, and Thomas Freeman shares yet more of his valuable, indeed essential, work on the sufferings of Protestants in Mary's reign, with John Foxe's Acts and monuments (‘Book of martyrs’) as its main basis. Also particularly valuable is the focus, in essays by Thomas Betteridge, on literary portrayals of female authority and rule, produced under England's first sovereign queen, and Aysha Pollnitz and Andrew Taylor on her own education and religious outlook. Pollnitz's analysis of Mary's religious views is particularly perceptive in its penetration through still-conventional denominational labels in religion, though Taylor does not seem fully to appreciate the polyglot and cosmopolitan world in which the queen lived, along with the rest of the educated English elite. In particular, at various points in the volume, the Spanish presence in Mary's life and reign, including that of her husband Philip and his ecclesiastical advisers, fails to achieve adequate appreciation, as does Cardinal Reginald Pole's international formation, before he took up his papal legation to England and replaced Thomas Cranmer as archbishop of Canterbury. This is a pity, as the lack detracts from what is otherwise a significant contribution to Marian studies, which will none the less be essential reading for any serious student of Mary's reign.