Since the advent of the “new British history” some thirty years ago, studies of sixteenth-century English literature that take as their subject national self-consciousness have been keen to explore the impact of English colonial expansion. In order to construct itself as a nation, England engaged in empire building that sought to shore up its past (a British root through reinterpretation of figures such as Arthur) as well as its present (colonial expansion into Ireland, the absorption of Wales, and efforts to control Scottish territorial disputes). In his “study of England's ‘postcolonial’ self-image in earlier Tudor literature, of Tudor England's portrayal in literature as ‘an empire of itself’” (10), Stewart Mottram argues that emphasis on the matter of Britain has kept scholars from interrogating the ways England conceived of itself as a coherent English nation. He makes the case that “the term ‘imperial’ did not always connote colonial expansion in the sixteenth century and that, when some Tudor writers referred to England as an empire, they were indeed referring to England, not Britain, to a sovereign realm, not a synecdoche for ‘the[m]pire of greate Briteigne’” (10).

In his introduction, Mottram offers a reading of John Leland's Laboryouse Journey (written in 1546, edited and enlarged by John Bale for publication in 1549) in an effort to demonstrate that Leland and particularly Bale were hard at work in the wake of the dissolution of the monasteries to preserve books and English history. Taking issue with elements of Philip Schwyzer's thesis in Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge, 2004) that the Tudor dynasty memorialized, glorified, and co-opted ancient British cultural forms and figures, Mottram casts Leland and Bale as saviors of the contents of monastic libraries for the purpose of rescuing a narrative of early Britain as a proto-Protestant resistor of Roman domination. That Bale and other committed reformers were interested in establishing linkages between England and the early Christian church is indisputable, but to praise Bale as one who sought to “preserve the books, or ‘lyuelye memoryalles of our nacyon’” (28), as Mottram does, ignores Leland's and Bale's roles in destroying books that did not conform to the Reformation narrative. It will hardly do to describe Bale as a “bibliophile” who heroically opposed Catholic, “Diocletian-like biblioclasts” (28) when there is convincing evidence in the work of Jennifer Summit, for example, that antiquarians and polemicists saved books that were ideologically acceptable and destroyed those that were not. Mottram is here too credulous a reader of Bale's claims of innocent historical narration, ignoring the force of Bale's polemic (“Books were burning in Bale's England as they had in Gildas's Britain—and like Gildas before him, so Bale sat down and wept” [30]). This section of the book would also benefit from attention to the tensions inherent in the reasons for Leland's Itinerary: the extensive libraries compiled by monks, filled with an irreplaceable treasure of manuscripts and books, were destroyed by Henry VIII for reasons that can only with great effort be described as charitable to such materials.

Part 1, “Empire,”—with chapters on the entry into London of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Henry VIII in 1522, and Anne Boleyn's precoronation entry into London in 1533—explores the way the representational practices of the London pageants aided in constructing Tudor England as “an empire of itself” (1). These pageant accounts, Mottram suggests, bolster England's claim to be an “empire of itself” by offering visual comparisons between, respectively, Henry and the Holy Roman emperor (Henry's equal status as the ruler of an empire) and Henry and Constantine (Henry as the second coming of the first Christian emperor). These strategies had diminishing returns, however, as aligning England with the Habsburgs and Rome suggested imperial ambitions that were not the primary focus of the Tudor state and its supporters.

In part 2, “Nation,” Mottram details how this primary focus—England as an empire apart, a coherent nation—is abetted by writers as diverse as Richard Morison (in his pamphlets from the 1530s against the Lincolnshire Uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace), John Bale (King Johan [1538]), and Nicholas Udall (in his play Respublica [1553]). Each of these writers uses prosopopoeia to represent English Bible readers as a community who “consent to the Royal Supremacy on the basis that it comes with a scriptural authority attached” (33). Mottram shows convincingly that, between the 1530s and Mary's ascension in 1553, the hope that an English Bible-reading community would lead to a stable, indeed manageable, English Protestant nation fell apart due to a lack of interpretive agreement. The assumption made by Tyndale, Bale, and others that the Bible would serve as the unifying, univocal message for a united English Protestant nation was not borne out in these decades, as manifested by Udall's embrace of Mary as “Nemesis, the goddess of revenge and agent of God's wrath visited upon the sins of Edwardian England” (214).

Mottram's book performs a useful service in calling our attention to the ways the English nation was an intelligible prospect in the mid-Tudor period: that alongside colonial machinations were insular ones as well. My reservation about the second half of the book and its conclusion is one of degree: the efforts of Protestants such as Tyndale, Bale, and even Foxe to insist that Bible reading, and indeed English and British history, be a proscriptive practice, one that could admit of no interpretive disagreement, had more wide-ranging conceptual effects than just as an epiphenomenon of the creation of an English nation.