This is a significant and powerful book, as well as a large and comprehensive one, the first part of a projected trilogy on the public face of early modern monarchy. It is an account of representations of the English crown—whether verbal, written, performative, or visual—throughout the Tudor century, and it is committed to the thesis that the sixteenth century saw the origins of a modern culture of consumer politics. In Sharpe's analysis, a series of interconnected factors—notably the Reformation's injection of ideology into politics, the development of English printing, and the growth of a market-driven consumer society—determined that the 1530s saw “the birth of a public sphere in England” (30). From that point onward, politics in England was driven by representation, the necessity that political actors position themselves and their relationship to power in ways calculated to win approval and produce legitimacy. But, crucially in Sharpe's analysis, this process of representation was not a one-way street: representation was a reciprocal process in which the public's own images of their governors reflected back and helped to shape discourses of power. Instead of a story of “propaganda” in a simplistic sense, this is a story of cultural development in which politics is negotiated between government and people through the medium of the market for texts, plays, images, and other forms of representation. The book's thesis, which clearly sets the stage for Sharpe's forthcoming work on the Stuarts, is that by courting and achieving “popularity” the Tudors both reached the apogee of English monarchical power and paradoxically planted the seeds of its demise by gradually putting the monarchy “in thrall to a (potentially capricious) public opinion” (481).

Along the way there are a variety of fascinating set pieces and more particular arguments that will be of great interest to specialists. Sharpe's argument that Queen Mary was the only Tudor monarch who lost the battle for public opinion in her own lifetime will serve as an important and controversial challenge to revisionist historians of the reign. Sharpe's argument that Queen Elizabeth's power was imbricated with a growing commercial market for representations of monarchy will challenge historians who have placed such a transformation in the reign of Queen Victoria. Sharpe's discussions of the public sphere implicitly challenge many of the essays in a recent collection devoted to the politics of the public sphere in early modern England. Many more examples could be cited. All of this is excellent and very nicely done, more than enough to qualify Selling the Tudor Monarchy as an important book that will profitably be read by students and scholars for many years.

What surprises me, however, is the elaborate framing of this book, which announces the turn to “representation” as a novel historiographical intervention and posits that historians must turn to other fields—literary criticism, anthropology, art history—in order to recognize that politics was about “culture” rather than merely administration. Reading Sharpe's introductory chapters, I was reminded how very American I am, for the intervention he proposes has dominated the American historical profession for the past twenty-five years under the names “cultural history” and “the cultural history of politics.” Indeed, they are so dominant that one occasionally hears grumblings at the North American Conference on British Studies that no one who dares to practice “old fashioned” political history rather than the cultural history of politics can get a job at an American university. Here at Berkeley where I work we even have a journal called Representations. As I think about it, I know few scholars who do not already practice some version of what Sharpe preaches, focusing on the cultural meanings of politics or the discursive construction of political events (although I would admit that we tend to focus on textual rather than visual evidence since few of us have the specialized training to intervene successfully in art history). This is not to suggest that Sharpe's book is redundant or derivative; it is a truly original study. I would simply suggest that it is original (and excellent) in argument and scope rather than methodology.

Indeed, it may be that the reason other historians of political culture have not written more monographs on the representation of monarchy is that such historians tend to focus on more diffused and structural forms of power; they see monarchy as an institution that has received disproportionate attention, distracting us from more subtle and normative battlegrounds of political legitimacy such as the representation of masculinity, the representation of order, the representation of justice, and so forth. At some level, then, Sharpe's book can productively be read as a response to these historians, suggesting through its long sections of narrative political history that we need to return to more traditional subjects. Many readers will agree; even those who do not will see enormous virtues in Sharpe's magnum opus and look forward eagerly to volumes 2 and 3.