In Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain. Martha Vandrei uses historical constructions of Queen Boudica, the warrior queen of the ancient British Iceni tribe, to make an argument about the nature of history in Britain over five centuries. Her 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.

Vandrei's core argument is conservative: a plea for continuity in understanding of historical practice. Through the vehicle of Boudica, she seeks to demonstrate that history as an idea of truth has remained relatively fixed across the centuries. Long before the professionalization of history in the late nineteenth century, she argues, disciplinary boundaries were being imposed and policed across an array of cultural productions. History is therefore “a form of broad-based, organic cultural production” (204). History as organic is the key; it underpins Vandrei's refutation of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's 1993 “invention of tradition” thesis. The idea that any political present has ever had the power to invent wholly alternative pasts is strongly rejected (see 80). Rather, ideology, politics, the market, and circumstance coalesce as the ingredients of a recipe for “historical culture,” always tested against successive contemporary standards of veracity. Following Raphael Samuel, traditional critiques of invented traditions usually come “from below,” that is, a challenge to the Marxist determinism that renders the recipients of culture void of agency. But that is not the line here. History is rendered as an individual, creative process with clear “interpretative limits” (82).

The spine of the book is a close analysis of various historical products that deal in the Boudican currency, including drama, poetry, prose, and pageantry. The first chapter is an excavation of Edmund Bolton's (c.1574–c.1634) historical practice from within his political and ideological entanglements, resulting in a deep study in historical method and classical reception. The second chapter considers seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose histories and historical stage dramas and attempts to trace, in a material sense, how far Boudica's story had begun to “percolate through popular culture” (60). The subject of chapter 3 is eighteenth-century romantic and Enlightenment histories, signaling the growth of “historical discourse as a facet of political debate” (82).

The fourth chapter moves into the early-nineteenth century and considers poetry, plays, and Boudica's (limited) didactic role in early women's histories. This period is typically seen as the moment when the popular history market exploded in Britain. Instead this book, through the Boudican lens, sees the early nineteenth century as another chapter in the long and slow growth of history since the sixteenth century. The following, fifth chapter offers a robust counter to the orthodoxy that Boudica was suddenly reinvented as an imperial icon in the later nineteenth century. The final chapter brings Boudica into the twentieth century and considers her place in regional and community histories, convincingly highlighting the “location-specific nature of historical culture” (173) in the early part of the century.

It is stated early on in the book that studying this organic “historical culture” can connect and historicize the fields of “memory, public history, popular history, and historiography” (15), and in the conclusion we find that Boudica's representation “must remain in a state of irresolution” (203) in order to maintain the argument about “historical culture.” I think this claim for the concept of “historical culture” ultimately overreaches, on two grounds. Firstly, I am not left entirely convinced that the single and peculiar example of Boudica can carry the weight of this assertion—that Queen Boudica alone can deliver to us “an alternative way of understanding the place of the past” (21). She is a figure from the ancient past, itself a field subject to particular discourses and methodologies less relevant to histories that deal, for example, in living memory or material culture. Boudica is also a woman, making her doubly unusual. Boudica's sex and femininity are dealt with at various points, but there is a strong sense that this distinguishing feature is being downplayed (see 25, 49). In doing so. Vandrei avoids engaging in a gendered analysis of historical production and reception, even when discussing themes of sexual violence (71–72) and female authorship (161–67). The absence of an analysis concerned with gendered power differentials, which Bonnie G. Smith has argued shaped the very idea of Western historiography, is much felt overall.

Secondly, questions of reception rarely reach beyond high-level critical responses to historical products. In chapter 4, an intriguing, Barthesian argument about “creation as reception” is introduced in a discussion of early nineteenth-century stage plays, which suggests that we ought to understand each successive retelling of Boudica's story as indicative of how historical ideas are received. It does seem to follow, therefore, that this version of historical culture must remain the preserve of the thought worlds of a relatively elite set of individuals. This is not necessarily a criticism; it is obviously nearly impossible to measure received notions of truth beyond the minds of those who have the means to articulate themselves. It simply chastens the scope of the book's opening claim for a holistic notion of historical culture that encompasses the popular, situating it more within the history of ideas.

Throughout the book, we find Boudica is simultaneously subject to empiricism and imagination, to objectivity and subjectivity. Maintaining this balance is Vandrei's greatest achievement here, alongside the demonstration of the importance of creativity in the making of history. Through discussions of drama and pageantry, Vandrei does much to show that imagination and emotion have been long-standing markers of historical thinking in Britain. Overall, as the conclusion explains, Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain is an ambitious attempt to unite the two ideas contained in the title. Although the seams of that union are showing in places, it is nonetheless a superb book that offers an enormous amount to think with for scholars of Britain, and of history.