Boudica: Iron Age Warrior Queen

"This was an attempt to write a popular account of Boudica, taking in the whole story, starting off with the Iron Age, the society into which Boudica was born and taking the stories through. We can’t talk about her childhood particularly, but we can say something about her involvement with her husband or partner, Prasutagus, and the uprising against Rome, what caused it, and the aftermath. And then the book looks at how her story was lost in the post-Roman ages and reinvented again after the classical texts were rediscovered during the Renaissance in the 16th century. We take the story right up to the present day—2003 in this case, since the book was published in 2005. I think the thing that was particularly original in the book was our attempt to look at materials from the Renaissance, right up to the present day. At the time, Boudica was very popular because we’d had the awful events of 9/11 in America. Several people said, in the early 2000s, that Boudica was, effectively, an indigenous rebel. Perhaps she helps us think about some of the things that people fighting imperial power do, and why they do them. So perhaps it makes us a bit more reflective on what caused 9/11 and some of the other terrorist outrages that have occurred. I’m not suggesting it should make us sympathetic to terrorists. But perhaps it helps us to think about them, in terms of our own country, and things that people living in our own country did in the distant past in relation to powers that were then dominant. That really interested me at the time. That was partly the reason that I got really interested in Boudica and wanted to write that book. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Mary Beard wrote a review of the book, which she published along with other essays in Confronting the Classics . You have to read Mary Beard’s reviews very carefully because they tend to be very highly nuanced. Sometimes you can read something as complimentary, but it’s actually much more reflective and critical. I think that’s partly why Mary Beard is so famous. She’s really good at those sorts of complexities. When we look at her review, I take it as reasonably complimentary about my book. She was particularly complimentary about the second half of the book, less so about the first half. I think she felt we over-simplified the complexity of interpreting the archaeological materials. But she really did like the stuff about reception—on the Renaissance up to the present day."