The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England Book

Boadicea's Legacy explores the construction of personal and national identities in early modern England, highlighting problems and anxieties attendant on historicist projects of national identity in a nation with no native classical past. Pre-eminent among these anxieties was the fear of a savage femininity at the very origins of the nation. Boadicea, the ancient warrior queen, epitomized early modern beliefs in the inevitable excess and failure of female rule. Written in an accessible style, Boadicea's Legacy offers powerful new readings of the ancient British past in Shakespeare's King Lear and Cymbeline, persuasively illuminates a "Boadicean" heritage in royal iconography, drama, and the social symptoms of religious dissent, and finally, articulates parallels between the eventual domestication of Britain's warrior queen in Restoration drama, and the social, political and legal decline in the status of women.Read More