Reigning queens have fascinated the reading and theatergoing public for many centuries. The allure of powerful women and the desire to understand their influence in society and in politics (as well as in more intimate aspects of their lives) is perennial. From the nineteenth century, when Agnes Strickland and Elizabeth Strickland established their pioneering accounts of the Lives of the Queens of England by using original source material, female monarchs have been the focus of innumerable studies. At the present day, great queens are being reunderstood in light of issues that concern sexuality, gender, and the body.

Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England, edited by Carole Levin and Robert Bucholz, grew out of a recent conference held at the University of Nebraska. The volume is a collection of essays by scholars of history and English literature, several of whom have only just completed their doctorates in their respective fields. The contributors are Charles Beem, Sarah Duncan, Timothy G. Elston, Elaine Kruse, Michelle Osherow, Anna Riehl, Linda S. Schenk, Marjorie Swann, John Watkins, Michelle A. White, and Richardine Woodall. Although rulers as diverse as Esther in the Old Testament, Shakespeare's Cleopatra, the Empress Matilda, Elisabeth de Valois, and Henrietta Maria are addressed here, Elizabeth I is the centerpiece of the book, building on recent invaluable work by Susan Doran, as well as Levin's own writings, which include The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia, 1994). Amber Harris Leichner concludes the volume with two brief poems on Elizabeth's life and death.

Brevity precludes a discussion of each contribution here, but I wish to draw attention to Bucholz's witty essay on Queen Anne (1702–14). Anne has often been seen as a sad nonentity, a tragic mother whose eighteen pregnancies resulted in only one living son who died of smallpox in 1700. Her reputation has been clouded further by her complicity in the overthrow of her father, King James II, in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. For three centuries, she has been routinely dismissed as dull and overweight. Unlike Elizabeth or Victoria, she failed to give her own name to her age. Anne was a queen who “lacks even her own adjective” (243). In “Size Matters,” Bucholz makes the case that Anne is deserving of attention even if she was one of history's “good girls” (248, 265). Unlike Elizabeth, Anne “appears never to have flirted with gender-bending of any kind” (245). By trusting men of ability and representing herself as the loving mother of her people, she presided over the developments that Britain needed in order to establish its naval and commercial supremacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anne might be better understood as “the first fully successful constitutional monarch in British history” (262).

Another essay that attempts to reverse the standard perception of a familiar figure is Sarah Duncan's on the unheralded mercy that Mary Tudor (1553–58) showed when she pardoned some 600 prisoners after the Wyatt Rebellion in 1554. She has been calumniated since the sixteenth century as the “Bloody Mary” who was responsible for sending over 300 men, women, and adolescents to be burned to death for heresy (no one has quite worked out who first applied the epithet, though the martyrologist John Foxe is the likely suspect). The rest of her policies and achievements were usually considered as mere addenda to the accomplishments of her father Henry VIII or the attainments of her half sister Elizabeth.

The second book under review here, Mary Tudor, by Judith M. Richards, confronts the historiographical problems that Mary's reign poses. Until the mid-1980s, historians dismissed Mary as an even greater failure than Anne, though that trend began to change due to groundbreaking work by Jennifer Loach in Parliament and Crown in the Reign of Mary Tudor (Oxford, 1986) and by Susan Brigden in London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), as well as in several studies by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Following Eamon Duffy's outstanding success in The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, CT, 1992), many aspects of early modern Catholicism and Mary's influence over the English Church have had to be reexamined. Of particular note in recent years are a collection of essays in The Church of Mary Tudor, edited by Eamon Duffy and David Loades (Brookfield, VT, 2006), and William Wizeman's The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor's Church (Aldershot, 2006). Eamon Duffy's latest book, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT, 2009), promises to revise once again our appreciation of religion and politics under England's first crowned queen regnant.

Richards confronts all of the most difficult problems associated with Mary's life and rule, including her health, the legal and political ambiguities inherent in the marriage she made with Philip of Spain, her phantom pregnancies, and her troubles with the papacy. In an era when a married woman could never be certain whether or not she was with child and when many medical maladies were automatically “attributed to malfunction of a woman's womb” no matter how inappropriate that diagnosis was (225), we may no longer assume that Mary was irrational when she believed that she was pregnant. Other women at the Tudor and Stuart courts endured similar events. Mary's health as a young woman was sound, but we may never know what took her life, after many weeks of illness, in November 1558, when she was approaching the age of forty-three. One of the last concerns that she was able to express was for the welfare of the women who served in her household.

Of enormous importance is Richards's interpretation of the Marian burnings. The numbers sent to the stake during Mary's brief reign “were exceptional in English history” (193), and they “were unusually intense in the English experience” (194). Richards reminds her readers that all of the prosecutions against Protestants during Mary's reign were conducted under the law as it was established by Parliament and that penalties were enforced by local authorities. All of those condemned had trials. There is no contemporary account comparable in scope to Foxe's Actes and Monuments (1563), which details the sufferings of some 200 Catholics during Elizabeth's reign. Mary may have expected that some of her subjects would equivocate and get out from under the charges against them, but, if so, she and her magistrates had not reckoned on a hardening of opinion that had occurred among Protestants in the 1540s as a result of John Calvin's insistence that prevarication was unworthy of the believer. In an age when “the battle for Christian truth” imposed “very high demands on many participants” (197), Mary had to achieve a measure of consensus for her policies. Whatever responsibility she bore for the executions of heretics must be shared more widely, as a consequence of the legislation she promoted.

Mary achieved the most difficult of all political intentions in being accepted as “a female king” who claimed her throne by warfare when she dislodged Lady Jane Grey's succession (242). Mary created the standard against which Elizabeth and her successors would be measured. Elegant and astute, Mary Tudor is a triumph.