The life and legacy of King James VI and I receives a sympathetic and compelling reassessment in The Mirror of Great Britain by Clare Jackson. Crowned King James VI of Scotland in 1567 as an infant and King James I of England and Ireland in 1603, King James is most known for the 1611 Bible translation that bears his name, the "most influential and widely sold English-language work ever produced." But there is much more to the man, Jackson argues, and a new appreciation to be had for the "sheer difficulty, intensity and complexity" James the ruler faced in late-16th-century Scotland and as the first king of Great Britain.
Taking a nonchronological, thematic approach to her subject, Jackson assumes reader familiarity with James, but her charming prose and profusion of primary source material--including a plethora of the king's own writing and correspondence--invites readers into James's violent childhood in Scotland and his kingly vision of "a new state of Great Britain" that set the geopolitical stage for centuries to come. Along the way, Jackson explores James's "irrepressible love of lexis and wordplay," his same-sex relationships, and the "arduous, lonely, and exhausting" task of "ruling three separate kingdoms, over six decades, while simultaneously sponsoring a nascent global empire" in North America. The Mirror of Great Britain is an absorbing reappraisal of the man and "wordsmith monarch" who changed the face of Europe and Bible reading everywhere. --Peggy Kurkowski, book reviewer in Denver