At times, the actual history of what occurred in a specific time or place is less important than the interpretation of that history. Historical memory can be as significant as what actually happened. Today, it is often difficult to discover the “real” Queen Elizabeth I as our own images have been shaped by others over the 403 years since her death. In my own classes, I find students often more convinced by Judi Dench's Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love, Shekhar Kapur's Cate Blanchett, or HBO's Helen Mirren than by any historically based representation of the queen. Our own twenty-first-century visions of Elizabeth, though, are part of a long tradition of shaping her image, a tradition that she herself began while still alive. Her image, though, and the Elizabeth we often see today, was perhaps most affected by those who studied and propagandized the queen in the seventeenth century. Resurrecting Elizabeth in Seventeenth Century England, edited by Elizabeth Hageman and Katherine Conway, is a collected volume of essays that analyzes propaganda and interpretations of the queen throughout the seventeenth century. A good companion to Thomas Freeman and Susan Doran's The Myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke, 2004), this book adds a literary perspective to a topic that helped to shape the way in which England defined itself in the late early modern period.

Gloriana, the Phoenix, and the molder of Protestant England: these visions of Queen Elizabeth are popular even today. Resurrecting Elizabeth includes fifteen chapters that help to demonstrate how these images of the famous English queen were created. The book opens with a strong introduction by Elizabeth Hageman that uses both literature and art to demonstrate the importance of the image of Elizabeth. Hageman introduces several themes that run throughout the book, describing how Elizabeth transformed from a historical figure to a literary trope. She argues (as supported by Jonathon Baldo's contribution) that James tried to obliterate the memory of Elizabeth but that he failed. Instead, Elizabeth became a symbol used to critique the Stuarts and to affect politics, economics, religion, gender, and society in Britain during the seventeenth century. The two most common themes throughout the book include the imagery of Elizabeth as a phoenix and the idea that Elizabeth's history, whether real or imagined, was often called on to shape Stuart governmental policies. From political ballads of the Glorious Revolution discussed by Leslie C. Dunn to masques that challenged the greed of James I's court when compared to the more frugal queen, the memory of Elizabeth, both real and imagined, was used as a tool to keep the Stuarts in line. Particularly, the role of Elizabeth as the leader of Protestant England—and even, as Kim H. Noling demonstrates, the maternal founder of the English Protestant church—appears regularly throughout the chapters. The writers apparently ignored the fact that Elizabeth almost married a Catholic and also harassed many Puritans in England during her reign. Instead, as Erika Mae Olbricht wrote, “at various points in England's religious struggles with both domestic and foreign Catholicism in the seventeenth century, Elizabeth's Protestantism was deployed as a model for English religious identity” (220). Often the seventeenth-century authors, while promoting their visions of Elizabeth as nonfiction, were actually quite creative in their texts.

The greatest weakness of this book is also one of its strengths. The book includes fourteen chapters in addition to the introduction, giving a variety of perspectives on the topic and allowing the book to cover the entire seventeenth century. The disadvantage to including this plethora of material is that the chapters themselves are fairly short—often around fifteen pages—and many of the topics could be analyzed in more depth. For instance, in the chapter “The Phoenix Reborn,” Alan R. Young gives a stimulating overview of the brief use of the Elizabethan image of the phoenix as a symbol for James, but he does not have the space to explore the concept of the king's two bodies or the gendered aspect of the symbol in any great depth. Many of the chapters titillate the reader with their ideas, only to end, leaving the reader wishing for more. One of the best chapters in the book was that of Lisa Gim whose extremely well-written discussion of the use of Elizabeth by two female authors (outside of England, no less) left this reader wanting to learn much more. Finally, the closing essay by Susanne L. Wofford discussed the use of two texts (John Foxe from the sixteenth and Thomas Heywood from the seventeenth century) as being the basis of Kapur's film Elizabeth (1998). Again, this was a well-researched and well-written essay that tied together many of the ideas throughout the book and how long-standing the imagined reality of Elizabeth has been, but the chapter was limited to looking primarily at the first few scenes of the film, which detailed the story of Elizabeth under her sister Mary's reign. Resurrecting Elizabeth is a solid book that gives a great variety of literary interpretations of Elizabeth's reign that helps the modern reader to understand from where we receive our own views of the queen and of the past in general.