Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications: Royal Women, Power, and Persuasion by Valerie Schutte (review)

The past decade has seen a growing interest in early modern paratexts and a greater attentiveness to the bibliographical culture of the reign of Mary I. In this adaptation of her doctoral thesis, Valerie Schutte combines these interests by examining fifty-one book dedications to Mary (of which thirty-three accompanied printed books and eighteen accompanied manuscripts) and places them in the context of dedications addressed to Lady Margaret Beaufort and the wives of Henry VIII. In doing so, she aims to improve our understanding of the role played by powerful women in book production and to show ‘how dedications were used to negotiate power, favor, and religion’. Dedications are, she argues, a form of ‘textual negotiation’ and can be understood through ‘literary analysis’.

The structure of the book is largely chronological. It begins with a retrospective chapter examining dedications to female patrons other than Mary during the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. This is followed by a chapter on dedications to Mary before her accession and chapters on dedications written after her accession (one on printed dedications, one on manuscript dedications, and one on dedications including her husband Philip). The sixth and final chapter provides a survey of books known to contain Mary’s personal marks of ownership.

Whatever one thinks of the book’s aims and interests, its execution leaves a lot to be desired. The first thing which will strike many readers is the poor quality of the writing. Though one might wince at the missing articles, abrupt changes of tense, and incongruous word-choices, the problem goes a good deal deeper. A single example may suffice to illustrate the point. On page 83, Schutte states that ‘Like the unknown date of when Morley and Mary met, none of the eight dedicated books that Morley presented to Mary are dated either’. The word ‘either’ implies that the unknown date is undated when in fact it is unknown (and it is unclear, moreover, what an undated date would be). Sentences such as this can be found on most pages of Schutte’s book. The situation does not seem to have been improved much by the oversight of the publisher. There are numerous typographical errors, indicating poor copy-editing, and the index, which covers names and titles, but not subjects, runs to a mere four pages.

The content of the book is largely descriptive. Each chapter, besides the final one, works sequentially through a group of dedications, describing them and setting out the likely circumstances in which they were written and (where appropriate) published. In this respect, the book contains some useful observations. Schutte is alive, for example, to the different motives which authors may have had for writing dedications, suggesting that some may have sought patronage while others may have been attempting to influence policy or simply to make their books more saleable. But the manner in which the book is structured leaves Schutte little room for developing these observations into arguments. Indeed, the plodding manner in which she works through one dedication after another creates a laboriously factual quality which the frequent designation of things as ‘interesting’ or ‘important’ does little to dispel.

It is difficult to have much faith in Schutte as an historian of the book. It does not inspire much confidence to read unqualified allusions to manuscript ‘editions’ and to see Early English Books Online cited as the source of information which would more properly be ascribed to the English Short Title Catalogue. A more serious weakness, however, is the cavalier manner in which she draws inferences from the material properties of surviving early modern books. She uses the degree of wear which Mary’s books have sustained, for instance, as a guide to how heavily Mary herself used them. Similarly, the fact that Mary seems not to have annotated her books ‘suggests that...