ABSTRACT
At its core, this is a chapter about a woman who, like any good villain, just won’t stay dead. It is also a chapter about the interplay between two rulers well known in early modern England, one female and one male, and their relationship to nationalistic stories of origin. Both of these characters are fictional, if in various ways treated as true: the evil Albina and the good Brute. The myth of the latter, whereby Brute, descendent of Aeneas of Troy, arrives at, civilizes, and founds Britain, has been frequently discussed in critical scholarship.1 The literary fortunes and historiographical reception in the early modern period of Albina, on the other hand, have received less attention.
