Mary Tudor received eighteen manuscript dedications and thirty-three printed book dedications—more than fifty expressions of printers' or authors' hopes for patronage and of the queen's own interest in certain subjects. In Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications, Valerie Schutte analyzes the themes that emerge from these various dedications. The return of Catholicism was foremost, but certain additional themes are intriguing, such as what Schutte calls the subject of virtue, as well as a variety of texts on classical literature and philosophy and on the importance of subjects' obedience. All of these are found among the twenty-five printed book dedications given to Mary as queen, rather than during her time as princess. Schutte does not compare the subjects of Mary's manuscript dedications with the subjects of the print dedications, though it is clear that the interest in classical literature was strong in both. Interestingly, two of the manuscript dedications included pleas for help printing the manuscript, or at least help finding a wider audience. As Mary Roper Clark Basset wrote regarding her translation of Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History from Greek, “was I well affirmed that yf of your highness my doynges were approved, they shoulde undoubtedly be of all other a greate deal ybetter accepted” (93).

Schutte does make a useful distinction between the audience for manuscript and print dedications: the former would be read (mostly) by Mary alone, while the latter could be read by all. This distinction is important for it shows that it was printing that effected a real change in the practice of book presentation to superiors (though Schutte does not say this explicitly), making possible a more polemical perspective by authors. The authorial desire for patronage continues unabated from manuscript culture but expanded to include not only the benefits of personal, one-to-one sponsorship, as in the manuscript period, but the benefits brought about by securing a larger audience through the patron, who is asked to achieve a printed version of the work. Hence it might be correct to say that the function of the patron became even more important once printing was established.

Schutte argues there were distinct audiences for manuscript and print dedications. She also contends that the dedications show Mary favored Henrician Catholicism, not papal, and that her husband Philip was estimated to have had little political power. Additionally, Schutte points to the involvement of women in literary activities (or, in the now more widely used phrase, “literate practice”). Her contention that “all dedications sought to educate [Mary] in some ways” might be more suspect. Throughout the book Schutte spends considerable time on this point, several times explaining that authors of dedications did not write to instruct the queen. Determining whether or not there was a genuine instructive effort, however, seems less important than does investigating of the various postures that authors assigned the queen, and hence of the religious and political aspects of her life and reign, viewed through an intellectual lens.

Schutte concludes with a chapter on books owned by Queen Mary, an analysis that allows for a firmer sense of the queen's own positions. Here Schutte notes that the conclusions drawn by T. A. Birrell in his 1980s British Library Panizzi lectures (published as English Monarchs and Their Books, 1987) are still valuable: (1) Mary acquired books that supported her mother's position in the divorce; (2) her devotional or spiritual reading was heavily continental-printed; and (3) her devotional books show signs of use (bindings worn at the corners). Schutte adds her own analysis of Mary's books: her library revealed “that Mary saw herself as a well-educated religious queen whose duty was to restore Catholicism to England” (141).

Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications reflects the author's industriousness, and her inclusive study will be valuable to future researchers for its capsule summaries of the relevant background material on a myriad of Marian books. It does, however, bear some signs of the dissertation from which it originated. Despite strenuous efforts to link the first chapter, on printed books dedicated to Lady Margaret Beaufort and the wives of Henry VIII, with the Marian material that constitutes the book's subject, a significant comparison is elusive, perhaps because the chapter gives information on print works only, not manuscript and print, as elsewhere. For whatever reason, the connection of this material with what follows is tenuous.

It is surprising that, in a work that relies so heavily on quantification, there are no tables. The reader who wants to know, very simply, how many manuscripts or printed books were dedicated to Mary has to search through discursive text. Likewise, the dates of these works are found only by a hunt through text. The absence of a basic finding-aid like a chronological list of books, with provide publication dates, titles, and Short-Title Catalogue numbers considerably reduces the usefulness of this hardworking author's study.