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Perhaps no other work of secular poetry was as widely read in Tudor England as the historical verse tragedy collection A Mirror for Magistrates. For over sixty years (1559–1621), this compendium of tragic monologues presented in the voices of fallen political figures from England's past remained almost constantly in print, offering both exemplary warnings to English rulers and inspiring models for literary authors, including Spenser and Shakespeare.

In a striking departure from previous scholarship, Scott Lucas shows that modern critics have misconstrued the purpose of the tragic verse narratives of the Mirror, approaching them primarily as uncontroversial meditations on abstract political and philosophical doctrines. Lucas revises this view, revealing many of the Mirror tragedies to be works topically applicable in form and politically contentious in nature.

Lucas returns the earliest poems of A Mirror for Magistrates to the troubled context of their production, the tumultuous reign of the Catholic Queen Mary (1553–1558). As Protestants suffering from the traumatic collapse of King Edward VI's "godly" rule (1547–1553) and from the current policies of Mary's government, the Mirror authors radically reshaped their poems' historical sources in order to craft emotionally moving narratives designed to provide models for interpreting the political failures of Edward VI's reign and to offer urgent warnings to Marian magistrates.

Lucas's study also reveals how, in later poems, the Mirror authors issued oblique appeals to Queen Elizabeth's officers, boldly demanding that they allow the realm of "the literary" to stand as an unfettered discursive arena of public controversy. Lucas thus provides a provocative new approach to this seminal but long-misunderstood collection, one that restores the Mirror to its rightful place as one of the greatest works of sixteenth-century English political literature.

"A real pleasure. . . . Reading this book was like revisiting a country I thought I knew well with a guide who could show me all kinds of delights I had missed in my previous sojourns. . . . A terrific, engaging book." --Michael Schoenfeldt, author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship
"This Book of Starres" is one of those all-too-rare books in which an author's love of someone's work--in this case, the seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert--leads to a journey of exploration.
Herbert's poetry presents a special set of challenges: It is to the modern ear archaic, difficult in thought and structure, and entirely theological in character. Yet no poet is more deeply admired by those who know him well. "This Book of Starres" is meant to engage the reader in a process of reading by which this verse can be seen to be vivid and alive. It is the record of one person's life-changing involvement with the poetry of George Herbert; in this it is about not only how, but why we read great poetry.
"It is a joy to experience Herbert's poetry in the company of James Boyd White, whose affinity for the work is always convincing and seems at times preternatural. 'This Book of Starres' is a necessary pleasure: all readers of poetry, whether expert or inexpert, will find it enriching." --Alice Fulton
". . . both a delight to read, and one of the most instructive exercises in literature and theology I have read for a long time. . . . Herbert emerges as one of the greatest, a writer to test and change the imagination, the very way in which we think about the world and that which is beyond it." --Literature and Theology
James Boyd White is Hart Wright Professor of Law, Professor of English, and Adjunct Professor of Classical Studies, University of Michigan.