England's Insular Imagining

Lorna Hutson is Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford. She is the author of many books including Thomas Nashe in Context, The Usurer's Daughter, The Invention of Suspicion (which won the Roland Bainton Prize), and Circumstantial Shakespeare. She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700, which won the Bainton Reference Prize in 2018.

'This is, quite simply, a superb book. Ranging across a wide variety of sources - legal documents, neo-Latin, visual arts, cartography, poetry, prose, and drama - it does urgent and necessary work, anatomising the fiction of England's depiction as an 'island' nation and addressing the neglect of Scotland in accounts of English nationhood, an occlusion which Hutson convincingly traces to the persistent legacy of Tudor propagandists.' Cathy Shrank, Professor of English, University of Sheffield

• Introduction; 1. Writing the Forgotten War I: Henry's War, 1542-7; 2. Writing the Forgotten War II: Somerset's War, 1547-1550; 3. How England Became an Island: The Faerie Queene; 4. Scotland sui juris? Scottish Literature and the Marian Constitutional Crisis, 1567-73; 5. On the Knees of the Body Politic: Scottish Succession and English Liberties, 1567-1608; 6. Scotland Un-kingdomed: English History on Stage; 7. Race-Making in the Invention of Britain: The Masque of Blackness; 8. Divisions and Kingdoms: Oedipal Britain from Gorboduc to King Lear; Coda: Macbeth. 'Alas, poor country'.