Kavita Mudan Finn's study explores how historical narratives are shaped, transmitted, and rewritten in late medieval and early modern Britain. The book principally traces the literary afterlives of five women at the heart of the power struggles in fifteenth-century England: Margaret of Anjou (1430–1482), Cecily Neville (1415–1495), Elizabeth Woodville (c. 1437–1492), Anne Neville (1456–1485), and Elizabeth of York (1466–1503), although it touches briefly upon other figures such as Eleanor Cobham (c. 1400–1452). Representations of these queens and would-be queens, as Mudan Finn demonstrates, are shaped less by historical fact than by literary tropes borrowed from tragedy and romance and reshaped to serve the authors’ political and cultural ends. In a culture fraught with anxiety about female political agency, these tropes could be used to contain historical queens within predetermined roles—unruly adulteress, grieving mother, inconstant woman, or virginal object of desire. These roles provided authors with a shorthand vocabulary for moralizing about the perils of female influence; accounts of the fifteenth-century dynastic wars often associate powerful women with factionalism and political instability. However, in the hands of a sophisticated author such as Sir Thomas More, the use of generic tropes can also call attention to the text's own rhetorical manipulations and invite readers to approach historical narratives with skepticism.

This study's great strengths include its emphasis upon the interplay between genres and the impressive variety of sources it engages. These range from letters, chronicles, and representations from the visual arts, to more self-consciously literary forms such as complaint poetry and de casibus tragedy, to popular histories such as ballads and plays. Mudan Finn skillfully presents these texts in dialogue with one another in ways that both bring out the complexity of often-neglected works and shed a fresh light on more canonical authors. For example, she juxtaposes fifteenth-century chronicle accounts of English queenship with the representation of Gwynevere in Le Morte Darthur and its sources. This section makes a persuasive case that Malory is responding to the ways his own contemporaries constructed and manipulated images of the queen, especially narratives of queenly adultery, to serve political ends.

This wide-ranging approach also allows Mudan Finn to trace broad trends in historiography, such as the way history making becomes the property of the emerging middle classes as well as the aristocracy over the course of the sixteenth century. Works such as Thomas Heywood's Edward IV plays (c. 1599), in which Elizabeth Woodville is displaced by her husband's mistress, Jane Shore, register this shift. More crucially, the book explores the emergence of imaginative genres such as historical drama and complaint poetry, in which female voices, albeit ventriloquized by male authors, can plead their case without explicit authorial commentary and often provide a compelling counterpoint to official narratives. The stage, in particular, offers a multiplicity of voices that invite audiences to question received versions of history.

The centerpiece of this book is an extended analysis of Shakespeare's first tetralogy, the only chapter devoted to a single author. Characters in Shakespeare's history plays are shapers as well as subjects of history; they retell the past in competing and often self-serving ways. Initially, the power to refashion history through rhetoric is a male prerogative. Queen Margaret, however, lays claim to this ability, a move that, in Mudan Finn's words, “consistently draws attention to the masculine rhetoric of blaming women for the actions of men” (172). By the conclusion of Richard III, Margaret's awareness of the power of language and storytelling influences the other women. Queen Elizabeth, depicted from her first appearance in 3 Henry VI as quick-witted and rhetorically adept, systematically undermines Richard's attempts to rewrite history and to transform his courtship of her daughter into a Petrarchan narrative. If the female voices of Richard III are largely confined to speech acts typed as feminine—cursing, deception, and lamentation—they also provide the play's most powerful challenge to Richard's ability to shape his own public image. Dynastic wars may be won on the battlefield, Shakespeare reminds us, but political and historical legacies are shaped by words.

The Last Plantagenet Consorts combines exhaustive research with a subtle and complex argument about historiography, female agency, and the power of narrative—topics that remain provocative and timely. Witchcraft accusations may have lost their potency as political propaganda, but as Mudan Finn reminds us in her conclusion, cultural anxieties surrounding powerful women—especially wives perceived to have a dangerous influence over their husbands —are still a staple of modern-day political discourse. The book's broader focus on the crafting and revision of public image, similarly, continues to resonate. The medieval and early modern sources Mudan Finn analyzes, many of which are collaborative, anonymous, or existing in multiple versions, bear a striking resemblance to modern social media.