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Elizabeth I (elizabeth + i)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Lady Russell, Elizabeth I, and Female Political Alliances through Performance

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2009
Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich
The entertainment at Bisham Abbey in 1592 offers a rare example of female authorship and performance in a sixteenth-century dramatic text. Lady Elizabeth (Cooke Hoby) Russell wrote and staged this entertainment for Elizabeth I during a royal progress, and her two teenaged daughters performed speaking roles. The Bisham performance challenges assumptions about women's limitations, endorses a militant Protestant foreign policy, and revises conventions of Elizabethan progress entertainments to claim the genre as an appropriate arena for aristocratic women's political negotiations. In successful auditions to be maids of honor, the young Russell women urge the Queen to surround herself with capable female servants who can better assist her in religious and gender battles than her flawed male advisors. As they propose themselves as loyal alternatives to self-serving male courtiers, these young performers adopt elements of the Queen's image, revealing that they claim authority to engage in court performance and promote political agendas from her example. (E.Z.K.) [source]

Elizabeth I as Stepmother

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2009
Jacqueline Vanhoutte
As a number of scholars have shown, Tudor male subjects were able to arrogate to themselves unprecedented powers by playing gender against class hierarchies. This essay considers how tropes of surrogacy furthered this process of political enfranchisement. As Victor Turner suggests, recurrent tropes are dynamic phenomena, which change meaning over time in a way that reveals the "emotional and volitional dimensions" present in social contexts. The prevalence of surrogate mothers in Elizabethan political and literary discourses reflects such a volitional dimension: writers (e.g. Lyly and Shakespeare), courtiers (e.g., Sir Philip Sidney), and politicians (e.g. members of Parliament) used images of stepmothers in consciously manipulative ways. Because of the ambiguous nature of figurative language, these men posited innovative ideas indirectly long before it became possible to articulate them directly. The evil stepdames of Tudor lore form an important precedent for John Locke's enlightened "foster father," whose acquired authority undermines the divine rights of fathers and kings. Stepmother tropes provided an alternative to the dominant analogies between family and state,analogies that aimed at suppressing disobedience and rebellion and at naturalizing the status quo. While men like Sidney and John Stubbs probably intended only limited applications for their stepmother tropes, this essay shows that these tropes called their monarch's absolute rule into question and justified their own political activity. Elizabethan writers thus contributed to the process of unmooring the English monarchy from divine right ideology, a process that culminated, intellectually speaking, in Locke's insistence on the consensual nature of government. (J.V.) [source]

"Perfect hole": Elizabeth I, Spenser, and Chaste Productions

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 1 2002
KIMBERLY ANNE COLES
[source]

Sir Francis Knollys's Latin dictionary: new evidence for Katherine Carey*

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 209 2007
Sally Varlow
A Latin dictionary once owned by Sir Francis Knollys has come to light containing his records of his marriage to Katherine Carey, daughter of Mary Boleyn, and the births of their fourteen children. These previously unpublished details (here transcribed) strengthen the argument that Katherine was an illegitimate child of Henry VIII, born during his affair with Anne Boleyn's sister. Sir Francis's handwritten notes also reveal his wife's remarkably successful series of pregnancies; and the birth date of his daughter Lettice , branded a ,she-wolf' by Elizabeth I , who turns out to be younger than is usually claimed when she married Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. [source]

Elizabeth I and the verdicts of history,

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 194 2003
Patrick Collinson
Archbishop Matthew Parker feared that Elizabeth would be ,strangely chronicled'. From her death to the screening of the film ,Elizabeth', the life of ,Gloriana' has been a subject for all kinds of imaginative fiction. History, too, has traded as much in myth as fact. Elizabeth's first historian, William Camden, was not responsible for the myth, although his translators were. The nineteenth century invented a ,whiggish' Elizabeth who identified herself with the destiny of her people, although the leading Tudor historian, A. J. Froude, was not a fan. Post-J. E. Neale and A. L. Rowse, Froude's critical interrogation of the reign has been revived in the latest Elizabethan historiography. [source]

Love-making and Diplomacy: Elizabeth I and the Anjou Marriage Negotiations, c.1578,1582

HISTORY, Issue 284 2001
Natalie Mears
The marriage negotiations between Elizabeth and Francis, duke of Anjou, have provided an important lens for exploring the nature of the Elizabethan polity. Conyers Read argued that Elizabeth deliberately exploited courtship rituals to gain ascendancy over ministers and foreign princes. Wallace MacCaffrey and Susan Doran argued that Elizabeth's commitment to the match was genuine, but that she was prevented from concluding the match because she lacked conciliar support. This article re-examines these arguments in the light of recent research on the language of courtship and archival study into the nature of the political agenda and crown-council relations. It suggests that English interest in the negotiations evolved from growing anxiety about the unresolved succession and that the relationship between Elizabeth and her councillors, especially over her marriage, was more nuanced than has been conventionally thought. Courtship rituals were adopted to express relationships between Elizabeth and her courtiers, but these reflected a revival of chivalric court culture and were not adopted as forms of political action. The article suggests that the twists and turns of the negotiations have to be seen in the context of the active role that Elizabeth took in policy-making, the personal and political issues the marriage raised and Elizabeth's own conception of how effectively an alternative (political) resolution would work. Elizabeth was shrewd enough to see that rules framed for chivalrous love-making might very aptly be applied to diplomatic purposes, and very probably for that reason she always liked to mingle an element of love-making in her diplomacy. [source]

What Happened to English Catholicismafter theEnglish Reformation?

HISTORY, Issue 277 2000
M. C. Questier
This article looks again at how historians have discussed Roman Catholicism in England after Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558. Some scholarly treatments of the topic have represented it as a popular but essentially introspective parish religion. Others have taken it to be an active clericalist force in early modern English national politics. This has made it difficult to define Catholicism's place in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. Of course, Catholicism in this period clearly had a range of meanings. This article tries to draw some of them together by probing a series of contemporary opinions about Catholicism, and how contemporaries thought it could be expressed and practised. [source]

"A mercer ye wot az we be": The Authorship of the Kenilworth Letter Reconsidered

ENGLISH LITERARY RENAISSANCE, Issue 2 2008
Elizabeth Goldring
The authorship of the Kenilworth Letter, an account of the festivities staged at Kenilworth Castle during Queen Elizabeth I's 1575 progress, has long been a matter of debate, with some scholars suggesting that the work was a pseudonymous hoax foisted upon an unwitting Robert Langham. New findings, together with a re-examination of the existing evidence, suggest the following: first, that the Letter began life as a bona fide missive from Langham to his fellow mercer Humphrey Martin, which, though envisioned for circulation in manuscript, was almost certainly not , in the first instance at least , intended for publication; and second, that William Patten, to whom the Letter sometimes has been attributed in the past, may have been instrumental in the initial efforts to print the work, albeit without Langham's knowledge or permission. Also considered is the wider context of Elizabethan mercery, with particular reference to the close (but often overlooked) political, economic, and cultural ties between the court and the City of London. In addition, this article explores the extent to which the Letter offers a reliable guide to the people, places, and events it describes. [source]