1. Introduction: Studies of Queens in Honor of Carole Levin
I. Prelude: Studying Queens
2. Queenship and Power: The Heart and Stomach of a Book Series
II. Queens and Matters of Gender
3. Did Elizabeth's Gender Really Matter?
4. A Great Reckoning in a Little Room: Elizabeth, Essex, and Royal Interruptions
5. "We are such stuff": Absolute Feminine Power vs. Cinematic Myth-Making in Julie Taymor's Tempest (2010)
III. Queens and Marriage
6. Elizabeth I and the Marriage Crisis, John Lyly's Campaspe, and the Politics of Court Drama
7. Tudor Consorts: The Politics of Royal Matchmaking, 1483–1543
8. The Queen's Deathbed Wish in Early Modern Fairy Tales: Securing the Dynasty
IV. Queens and Religion
9. Spenser's Dragon Fight and the English Queen: The Struggle over the Elizabethan Settlement
10. Anne Boleyn's Legacy to Elizabeth I: Neoclassicism and the Iconography of Protestant Queenship
11. "A Network of Honor and Obligation": Elizabeth as Godmother.- V. Queens, National Identity, and Diplomacy
12. Lesbianism in Early Modern Vernacular Romance: The Question of Historicity
13. Doppelgänger Queens: Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart
14. Elizabeth I and the Politics of Invoking Russia in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost
15. Queen Elizabeth I and Elizabethan Court in the French Ambassador's Eyes
VI. Inspired by the Queen: Queens in Literature
16. Queen of Love—Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Wroth
17. Dressing Queens (and Some Others): Signifying through Clothing in Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania
18. Conjuring Three Queens and an Empress: The Philosophy of Enchantment in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World
Anna Riehl Bertolet is Associate Professor of English at Auburn University, USA. She is the author of The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I (2010); and co-editor of Tudor Court Culture (2010), A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen 1500-1650: Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts (2016), and Creating the Premodern in the Postmodern Classroom: Creativity in Early English Literature and History Courses (forthcoming from ACMRS, 2018).
The essays in this book traverse two centuries of queens and their afterlives—historical, mythological, and literary. They speak of the significant and subtle ways that queens leave their mark on the culture they inhabit, focusing on gender, marriage, national identity, diplomacy, and representations of queens in literature. Elizabeth I looms large in this volume, but the interrogation of queenship extends from Elizabeth's historical counterparts, such as Anne Boleyn and Catherine de Medici, to her fictional echoes in the pages of John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish. Celebrating and building on the renowned scholarship of Carole Levin, Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies exemplifies a range of innovative approaches to examining women and power in the early modern period.