The Word of a Prince. A Life of Elizabeth I from Contemporary Documents.

Maria Perry's The Word of a Prince. A Life of Elizabeth I from Contemporary Documents (Woodbridge: Boydell P., 1990; pp. 352. [pounds]18.95) is not an orthodox biography, because each chapter or section is built around one or more of Elizabeth's own writings. Before her accession, where the surviving corpus is small, the commentary is used as straightforward historical and biographical background. But in the later parts, where the writings are more numerous, and some of them are much better known, the text and documents are interwoven; or, more accurately, some documents are extensively quoted in the text and others are printed in full and separately identified. The result is a …