This volume of essays, drawn together by Tatiana C. String and Marcus Bull, emerged from a symposium bearing the same title and held at the University of Bristol in December 2008. The thirteen essays—and, above all, the introduction—crackle with the energy and excitement of scholars forging a new interdisciplinary field, Tudorism, complete with all of the “cross-currents and synergies, parallels and divergences” (xv) that one might expect in a volume with contributors from the diverse fields of architecture, art, art history, design, geography, history, literature, music, and rhetoric. String and Bull explain that Tudorism, as an interdisciplinary category of analysis, takes as its subject “any and all representations, images, associations, artifacts, spaces, and cultural scripts that either have or are supposed to have their roots in the Tudor era” (1). As Billie Melman expands, Tudorism refers to “the myriad productions of Tudor pasts (in the plural, rather than a single and homogenous past) during the age of modernity, the multiplicity of their representations, and the circulation and uses of these representations, their appropriations and consumptions by individuals and groups” (38). Representations of Henry VIII loom large in the volume, stated most forcefully in David Starkey's concluding essay but also in outstanding essays by String, Greg Walker, and Jerome de Groot. The essays reveal the wide range of representations, from Tudorist art in England and France to Tudorist architecture in Manhattan and Shanghai. Above all, rather than presenting a definitive account of Tudorism, the volume opens new avenues of research, or what the editors hope “will become a sustained and multi-disciplinary research trajectory” (12). The breadth of examples in this volume indicates that these hopes are well founded.

For readers new to the field, the introduction compares and contrasts Tudorism with its chronological and methodological ancestor, medievalism. String and Bull, building upon medievalist methodologies, view representations of the Tudor era as either essentialist (reducing the period to cliché) or topical (using the period to address present-day concerns), and the essays in this volume demonstrate both uses of the past. Stephen Bann's essay on French artists illustrates these differences very well and shows how paintings—such as Paul Delaroche's The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833)—could employ both modes in different circumstances depending upon the context of the artist and the viewer. As the introduction claims and the essays prove, Tudorism is not simply a subfield of medievalism. Peter Mandler sums up the opinion of most contributors when he explains that the Tudor era offered an alternative to romantic “golden age” medievalisms that failed to embrace the complexity, or “mixed modernity” (56), of the nineteenth and (in the case of other essays) twentieth centuries. The first two essays by Mandler and Melman focus primary upon literary representations, and subsequent essays by Stephen Banfeld and Suzanne Cole explore Tudorism in Victorian and early twentieth-century music. Even for nonexperts, the musical “propensity for stalwart diatonic dissonance” makes sense within the context of the volume, as does its contrast with the non-Tudorist “decadent, murderous chromaticism of late Renaissance music on the Continent” (62). Other essays in the volume illustrate Tudorisms in architecture (Jonathan M. Woodham, and Andrew Ballantyne and Andrew Law), art (Bann and String), and film (Walker and de Groot). Throughout, a nationalist and imperialist element lurks in most Tudorisms, though contributors regularly point out nondominant appropriations and contributions, since as Patrick Collinson quips, “with the completion of the Channel Tunnel not even English fog can any longer cut off the Continent” (102). As a result, the essays reveal Tudorisms in some distinctly non-“English” places, such as in a Roman Catholic Church or in a Paris Salon.

Gender features heavily in the volume, as representations of the Tudor era appear inseparable from contemporary gender norms. As Walker notes in his essay, “Henry and Elizabeth seem to come gift-wrapped for posterity as a readymade and always already moralized diptych, depicting the two extremes of political and sexual probity” (223–24). Walker and de Groot, focusing upon television and cinema, analyze recent Tudorisms in light of twentieth- and twenty-first-century attitudes toward sex and gender, as personified by representations of Henry VIII as both a heteronormative “archetypal Everyman” (Walker, 234) while also a “gay icon” (de Groot, 258). The volume also presents gender analyses of Tudorisms in the Regency and Victorian eras, and even in the sixteenth century itself.

However, the myriad of Tudorisms did not coexist harmoniously and often came into open conflict. One might expect this to be the case in confessional representations of the Tudor church, and Collinson's essay provides excellent highlights of this conflict from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Perhaps less obviously, Woodham describes debates over twentieth-century Tudor design as nothing short of an “ideological battleground.” For, just at the point when the public demand for Tudor design, music, film, and so on, began to explode, intellectuals withdrew. Indeed, one of the tensions of the volume, which future scholarship should address in greater detail, concerns the point at which sophisticated Tudorism first enters the popular imagination and then devolves into Mock Tudor gables or Tudor farce. Bann demonstrates how engravings in illustrated magazines of nineteenth-century France helped to popularize Tudorism, and other essays reveal similar popularizing processes. Focusing upon the rich artistic and cultural legacy of Hans Holbein the Younger's famous portrait of Henry VIII, String's essay charts both elite and popular “afterlives” of “the synecdoche par excellence for the history of the English crown” (206). Yet many essays reveal the downside of Tudor popularization as, in the area of music, “by 1953, Tudorism [had become] a hackneyed package of cultural association” (73). Banfield concludes, therefore, that the 1953 performance of Gloriana fell flat because despite a public demand for Tudorism at the coronation of the second Queen Elizabeth, the “superior intellectual class . . . were spiritually incapable of delivering it” (75). Similarly, Mandler explains that, by the late nineteenth century, “the Olden Time was seen more as a kind of ‘adventure playground,’ increasingly for children, rather than as a place for serious cultural and political commentary” (34). Or, as Woodham concludes, “[T]he powerful spirit of the Mock Tudor in terms of a marketable ‘style’ has endured into the twenty-first century in housing and ‘British’ public house interiors around the world, even if it has all but disappeared as a term of approbation by a cultural elite” (153). Finally, de Groot attributes some of the negative critical reception of The Tudors (Showtime, 2007–10) to the show's “status as an artefact in popular culture. . . . [I]t is vulgar, bad, and of poor quality” (246). The essays of the volume, culminating in David Starkey's concluding essay, make the popularity of the Tudors abundantly clear, but only a few contributors pause to conceptualize and contextualize the convergences and divergences of popular and elite Tudorisms. Indeed, the volume posits many areas of cultural transmission, from illustrated magazines and children's books to recent fan wikis and online role-playing, but the sometimes complementary, oftentimes contradictory relationship between intellectual and popular Tudorisms remains an area for future research and explanation.

This is an exceptional volume of essays worthy of consideration by anyone interested in English history since 1485. Scholars interested in “Britain,” or rather those interested in Wales and Scotland as well as England, might find the volume lacking (references to Walter Scott notwithstanding). For, while the essays admirably explore Tudorisms beyond the island, they do not consider how the Welsh, for instance, remembered and represented their very own “Tudur” dynasty. Indeed, in the last pages of the volume, Starkey goes so far as to state without any reference to Wales or Scotland that “Henry really invented England as an island” (272–73). Nonetheless, just as medievalism has emerged from its origins in nineteenth-century studies, so too will Tudorism soon expand beyond the topics presented in this volume. Since the conference in Bristol, Hilary Mantel's Tudor novels have received two Man Booker Prizes for Fiction, thus demonstrating the enduring popularity of the Tudors and perhaps suggesting that the critics have warmed to the Tudors once again.