Reinventing Trojan Origins, Figuring Race and Nation in John Higgins’s First parte of the mirour for magistrates (1574)
Joseph Bowling
From Engaging with Troy: Early Modern and Contemporary Scenes (2026), pp. 93-110, doi:10.59860/t.c69642d
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| Part of the book: Engaging with Troy Edited by Francesca Rayner and Janice Valls-Russell Transcript 27 Legenda RenaissanceEnglishDramaFictionopen Abstract. In the 1570s the poet and scholar John Higgins tasked himself with extending the Tudor Mirror for Magistrates project back to the legendary origins of ancient Britain, a task he describes as cleansing the chronicle tradition of all ‘talk of the Romains, Greekes, Persians, &c.’ and of foreign ‘fables’. He weaves together historiographical sources and draws on Virgil’s epic model for his narratives, beginning with the tragedy of Albanact, the son of Brutus of Troy. This chapter reads Higgins’s First parte as participating not only in the broader Tudor construction of national identity, but more specifically in the imagining of an English racial identity — an emergent notion of whiteness — through Higgins’s displacement of Tudor imperialist discourse and national fantasy onto the figure of Brutus. Full text. This contribution is published as Open Access and can be downloaded as a PDF, or viewed as a PDF in your web browser, here: |
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