© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2015 DOI 10.1179/1041257315Z.00000000063 Mirror, Mirror: Princely Hermeneutics, Practical Constitutionalism, and the Genres of the English Fürstenspiegel Matthew Giancarlo University of Kentucky, USA The “mirror for princes” or Fürstenspiegel challenges us to understand how this ostensibly practical and political genre of writing was understood in contemporary contexts, given the ubiquity and variability of its forms over time. This article posits the importance of mirror-texts as constitutional writ- ings, especially in the English fifteenth century. It investigates aspects of Fürstenspiegel texts relating to their accretive and “sedimented” qualities, a term that has been used for genre analysis by Fredric Jameson. It explicates the self-representations of mirror-texts as didactic guides that try to educate and to constitute a prince, especially in the works of Thomas Hoccleve and John Fortescue, where the prince is ideologically understood not just as an individual but as a self-authorizing embodiment of the basic principles of law. The analysis concludes by suggesting the broader significance of mirror- texts as a politically foundational genre of sovereignty, both for the times in which they were written and for the historical discourses of constitutional- ism that have come down to the present day. keywords Fürstenspiegel, mirrors for princes, De regimine, genre, constitution- alism, Thomas Hoccleve, Sir John Fortescue, Fredric Jameson, Giorgio Agamben Among the many narrative and didactic genres of medieval European literature, few are simultaneously as ubiquitous and as unlocatable as the “mirror for princes” or Fürstenspiegel. With the possible exception of romance, none are as protean and accretive. We can think of the “mirror” as a general or heuristic classification for political literature, but as J. P. Genet has noted, the difficulty with even this provi- sional gesture is that “this literature defies all attempts at definition, even classifica- tion” (ix). Even in a limited accounting the Fürstenspiegel appears less as a genre and more a genre of genres. It includes the texts of the De regimine tradition proper in its primary Aristotelian/Aegidian and Thomistic/Ptolomaic strains; texts of the exemplaria, Vol. 27 No. 1–2, Spring/Summer 2015, 35–54