Kevin Sharpe died too young. His loss to early modern British history is great. Prodigiously prolific and constantly inventive, holding chairs in History and English (and could have migrated to History of Art), his intellectual trajectory had three phases. He began in early Stuart politics, among the anti-Whig revisionists: the denotative term was ‘faction’. Then he discovered the cultural turn, and explored the politics of literature and history of reading: the new terms were ‘discourse’ and ‘rhetoric’. His third and final phase produced a formidable trilogy on the ‘selling’ of Tudor and Stuart monarchy, the key terms now ‘image’ and ‘representation’. Selling the Tudor monarchy (2009) was followed by Image wars (2010), and now, posthumously (brought to press by Mark Knights), Rebranding rule (2013), covering the later Stuarts: 2,000 pages all told. Rebranding rule rests on four pillars. The first and second pervade the trilogy: historians must look not only at written texts but at visual culture; and must see that early modern monarchs engaged in the orchestrated projection and manipulation of their images. The others are bespoke for this book. Third, the management of the post-Restoration monarchical image was democratised; and, fourth, post-Revolution historians must recognise, whatever the changes wrought in 1688, that political culture remained emphatically monarchic. Democratisation took two forms. Under Charles ii the king's physicality and sexuality became matters of public attention. The divine monarch who ‘touched’ the sick to cure disease was simultaneously a priapic lord of moral misrule. The management of the royal image also became democratised in the more permanent sense that the agents who deployed it were autonomous and various. The court controlled only a modicum of the multifarious phenomena of visual and literary royal iconography. Partisan politicians, Grub Street hacks, clandestine balladeers, engravers in wood and copper, dealers in prints and medals, all shaped the image of monarchs in order to project their own imagined polities, as well as to profit from consumers' desire for charismatic authority. This participatory, distributed agency is a theme already central in Hannah Smith's fine book for the succeeding period, Georgian monarchy: politics and culture, 1714–1760 (2006). Sharpe is constantly energetic and resourceful in reading not only familiar sources – portraiture, coronation rituals, thanksgiving sermons, royal speeches, proclamations, panegyric verse – but also in disinterring the unfamiliar: prayers, medals, Delftware, history books, battle narratives from the campaigns of James duke of York and William iii. We are reminded of contemporaries' pervasive reliance on allegory, grounded in scriptural and classical narratives: David, Absalom, Constantine, Augustus, Astraea, Deborah; and of the polemical redeployment of earlier monarchs' reputations as models or admonitions in the present, especially Elizabeth and the ‘Martyr’ Charles i. Sharpe does not neglect the counter-culture of Jacobitism, and has many fine set-pieces, such as the cult of Charles ii's escape from Worcester and the sudden death from smallpox of Mary ii. The book has some defects: the writing is occasionally repetitive and conceptually slack; errors creep in as the material tumbles forth; secondary reading is not always thorough. Yet Rebranding rule stands as the most comprehensive available account of the culture of authority in the later Stuart period: brimming, capacious, tessellated.