In a characteristically candid moment, Natalie Mears notes that in writing Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms, she often felt that she was producing “a book of two halves” (7). The first half investigates the conditions of political debate at the Elizabethan court, and the second examines how those debates resounded throughout England, Ireland, and Wales. Whether one treats Mears's project as a book or books, it is both geographically and historiographically ambitious. She takes strong issue with almost every scholar who has ever written on queenship, court politics, and policy. Mears embraces the challenge of writing British history as fully as possible with ample discussion of how political controversies resonated differently throughout the queen's multilingual realms.

Although the book moves centrifugally to the most distant extent of Elizabeth's authority, it opens with a useful consideration of counsel and debate within her immediate circle of advisers. In a chapter on “the politics of intimacy,” Mears argues that “Elizabethan counselling was … neither institutionalised nor conciliar” (47). At no point did the Privy Council, as a distinct institutional body, monopolize or even dominate political conversation. Like other European monarchs, Elizabeth discussed matters of state with individual counselors outside formal meetings, with nonconciliar members of her court, and often with men who had particular expertise on specific areas of policy. The counselors themselves participated in their own networks of counsel and advice that extended well beyond the court.

In the second half of the book, counsel shifts to news: to what extent did subjects both at court and beyond take up political matters outside a framework of advice and consultation? The same personal networks that widened the pool of advisers beyond the Privy Council also carried news about marriage negotiations, the long debate over Mary Stuart, and other affairs of state far into the queen's realms. Mears defines news broadly in order to avoid an anachronistically narrow understanding of it as verifiable information about major foreign and domestic political events. According to Mears, the Elizabethans were also interested in rumors about Elizabeth's illegitimate pregnancies, witchcraft cases, murders, and monstrous births (147).

Mears stresses that print was not necessarily the most important vehicle for Elizabethan news. Courtiers wrote letters recounting political developments to friends and relatives in the country. News also circulated in the form of ballads, sermons, proclamations, prayer books, and stage plays. Above all, people passed along news orally at taverns, inns, marketplaces, Inns of Court, and anywhere else they might gather. Obviously, much of that oral transmission is difficult to trace. The records we have, which focus typically on seditious speech, may leave the unverifiable and probably incorrect impression that most public discourses were critical of the regime. Mears devotes her final chapter to a consideration of the range of attitudes toward the queen expressed by her subjects in England, Ireland, and Wales. The chapter makes good use not only of printed treatises and prosecution records but also wall paintings, bardic poetry, and even accounts of bell ringings on the queen's accession day.

A carefully researched book describing the nature and range of Elizabethan political discourse is long overdue. Although Mears raises some important questions and even poses some possible answers, her book would have been more valuable if she had couched it more as a thorough analysis of her substantial archival evidence on its own terms and not as a refutation of everyone else in the field. Within seventeenth-century studies, revisionism has yielded to a fixation on Habermas that combines Frankfurt school vocabularies with neo-Whig sentiment. Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms moves this Habermasian project backward even further to the third quarter of the sixteenth century. Habermas coined his famous phrase “the public sphere” (Öffentlichkeit) with reference to the specific political conditions of the long eighteenth century. The sphere was not only public but fundamentally bourgeois. It was the site for the free exchange of ideas without constraint by either the state or the overall economic structures of society. Its difference from the state was one of its primary defining aspects.

Mears spends a lot of time arguing that Habermas got it wrong, since that is not how public discourse functioned in the Elizabethan period. What Mears calls at times the Elizabethan public sphere, for example, was not necessarily oppositional. But Habermas was a philosopher, not a historian, and he introduced the public sphere primarily as the first term of a critique of modern capitalism. There is finally something intellectually meaningless in detaching the vocabulary of the public sphere from his overall argumentative context. Mears recognizes all kinds of ways in which the Habermasian model cannot be applied to the Elizabethan context but then persists in trying to make it apply by redefining it beyond recognition and even intelligibility: “I use ‘public sphere’ to denote the concept of the public sphere and as an initial term to refer to the Elizabethan public sphere prior to defining exactly what we should call it, or (with the adjective ‘Elizabethan’) as a short-hand to signify that I am referring to the concept of the public sphere in relation to the Elizabethan period” (10).

Similar conceptual difficulties weaken Mears's discussion of gender, an important secondary theme throughout her book. When she is not wrestling with Habermas, she is insisting against a considerable body of well-documented scholarship that too much has been made of Elizabeth's gender in particular: “Elizabethan policy-making was characterised by tension and conflict, more because of ideological difference between Elizabeth and her counsellors than attitudes toward gender” (101). But such an assertion assumes that ideology is always visible and explicit. Mears overlooks the implicit but nonetheless crucial role that Elizabeth's gender played in the very controversies over marriage, the succession, and the question of Mary Stuart that she sees as the key sites for exposing ideological differences among her counselors. The possibility that the queen might die in childbirth or betray her realm in submission to a foreign husband, for example, haunted conversations about her suitors at every level.

Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms benefits from a strong command of numerous important archival sources. But the book's historiographic reach exceeds its conceptual grasp. Its value rests more in its assessment of individual instances of archival evidence than as a systemic analysis of Elizabethan political discourse.