Baldwin’s Mirror, 1554–1610

The first chapter explores the development of the original collection of Mirror complaints in the voices of late medieval kings and rebels, sometimes known as ‘Baldwin’s Mirror’, from its suppression under Mary I, through its Elizabethan metamorphoses, to its final Jacobean iteration. The chapter aims to reframe discussion of the text together with its recensions, to effect a holistic analysis of the work’s reception and adaptation, instead of perpetuating the structural antagonism between phases in the corpus’s expansion. In particular, it addresses the editorial alterations made during the 1570s, the apex of the collection’s popularity, which shaped the direction in which later additions would develop, and the ways in which the complaints added in 1578, 1587, and 1610 build on Baldwin’s interrogation of historiographical transmission and unreliability.