The Face of Queenship investigates the aesthetic, political, and gender-related meanings in representations of Elizabeth I by her contemporaries. By attending to eyewitness reports, poetry, portraiture, and discourses on beauty and cosmetics, this book shows how the portrayals of the queen's face register her contemporaries' hopes, fears, hatreds, mockeries, rivalries, and awe. In its application of theories of the meaning of the face and its exploration of the early modern representation and interpretation of faces, this study argues that the face was seen as a rhetorical tool and that...

The first book to examine Queen Elizabeth I as a "learned prince," Learned Queen reveals a rather startling phenomenon: Elizabeth's educated status was crucial to England's burgeoning role as an international power. Examining Elizabeth's own demonstrations of erudition alongside literary works of such political luminaries as Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, this book reveals how poetry, foreign relations, and intellectual culture are far more integrated than we have hitherto imagined. From these connections emerges a methodology that places Elizabethan political culture...

This book tells the story of the queen whose marriage to King Henry VII ended England's Wars of the Roses and inaugurated the 118-year Tudor dynasty. Best known as the mother of Henry VIII and grandmother of Elizabeth I, this Queen Elizabeth contributed far beyond the act of giving birth to future monarchs. Her marriage to Henry VII unified the feuding houses of Lancaster and York, and her popularity with the people helped her husband survive rebellions that plagued his first decade of rule. Queen Elizabeth's gracious manners and large family created a warm, convivial Court marked by a rather...

Drawing on innovative research in the rapidly growing field of Mediterranean studies, this groundbreaking collection explores the key roles that Mediterranean queens played as wives, as mothers, and above all as political actors. Taken together, they form

This book focuses on the ways in which Elizabeth represented herself in her own words, especially in speeches, reported conversations, and private poems from the first half of her reign when she was simultaneously establishing her political authority and negotiating marriage at home and abroad. Although Elizabeth's novel and unprecedented art of courtship garnered considerable resistance and disapproval, by the end of her reign it had sparked or merged with a wider, ongoing social controversy over conjugal freedom of choice and women's lawful liberty that helped make the Elizabethan era an...

The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was greeted by an outpouring of official proclamations, gossip-filled letters, tense diary entries, diplomatic dispatches, and somber sermons. English poets wrote hundreds of elegies to Elizabeth, and playwrights began bringing her onto the stage. This book uses these historical and literary sources, including a maid of honor's eyewitness account of the explosion of the Queen's corpse, to provide a detailed history of Elizabeth's final illness and death, and to show Elizabeth's subjects - peers and poets, bishops and beggars, women and men - responding...

This book examines female lordship and the power of the political voice in medieval Northern Europe, focusing on three prominent, foreign-born queens of medieval Scandinavia - Agnes of Denmark (d. 1304), Eufemia of Norway (d. 1312) and Margareta of Denmark/Sweden (d. 1412) - who acted as cultural mediators and initiators of political change.

A fresh biography of Mary Tudor which challenges conventional views of her as a weeping hysteric and love-struck romantic, providing instead the portrait of a queen who drew on two sources of authority to increase the power of her position: epistolary conventions and the rhetoric of chivalry that imbued the French and English courts.

This edited volume brings together a collection of provocative essays examining a number of different facets of Elizabethan foreign affairs, encompassing England and The British Isles, Europe, and the dynamic civilization of Islam. As an entirely domestic queen who never physically left her realm, Elizabeth I cast an inordinately wide shadow in the world around her. The essays is this volume collectively reveal a queen and her kingdom much more connected and integrated into a much wider world than usually discussed in conventional studies of Elizabethan foreign affairs.

This book examines Elizabeth's correspondence with several significant rulers, analyzing how her letters were constructed, drafted and presented, the rhetorical strategies used, and the role these letters played in facilitating diplomatic relations.