We all understand what the Mirror for Magistrates genre is about. The genre was an English variant of the “mirror for princes” genre in that it offered sage, somewhat pedantic, advice on how to govern wisely to office-holders in England like the eternally praiseworthy justices of the peace. Scott Lucas, thankfully, offers a more subtle and, at the same time, startling picture of the genre in his study. It was not just a humanist, collection of predictable anecdotes on governance but, as he argues, was (at its inception) an allusive form of political resistance theory authored by disaffected Protestants in the reign of Mary I.

Lucas presents the Marian Mirror poems as an allusive form of political resistance polemic that set the table for what he regards as later Elizabethan attempts to limit the power of the monarchy, or what Patrick Collinson has identified as a “monarchical republic.”[1] Lucas’s study focuses primarily on the Marian iteration of the Mirror genre. For Lucas, the genre petered out as the Elizabethan religious settlement slowly achieved wide acceptance. As the Anglican church became ever more firmly entrenched the Mirror genre began to lose its impetus but he concludes that the Mirror tracts left an enduring legacy of a “growing assertion of parliamentary rights and personal liberties” (p. 235) that he regards as a feature of post-Elizabethan English politics.