"The many pieces of embroidery by Mary Queen of Scots or by Elizabeth Countess of Shrewsbury ('Bess of Hardwick') are among the best-known and most fascinating examples of historical embroidery. However, many questions surrounding their meaning and purpose - and, above all, the sources and patterns used for their imagery (including birds, fish, flowers, monograms, emblems and other devices) - remain unanswered." "In 1548, the five-year-old Queen of Scots left her native Scotland to begin her French upbringing as the future Queen of France and it was here that she learned the art of decorative needlework, continuing with the craft during the last twenty years of her exile and confinement in England. Many of her embroideries have survived and can be seen at Oxburgh Hall (Norfolk), the Victoria and Albert Museum and elsewhere, but many more have since disappeared. In this new study Michael Bath not only describes and illustrates the surviving embroideries, but also documents from early records a large number of those that have disappeared." "Many of these embroidered panels use emblems, combining a symbolic image with a learned adage, and Professor Bath shows how, in their own day, these were believed to hold moral, political and religious messages which expressed the Catholic queen's values, purposes and intentions. For this reason we find records of them in the forgotten files of the Elizabethan secret services. Mary's emblematic embroideries shed new light on issues surrounding one of the most controversial figures in English and Scottish history. At the same time, this new study shows exactly what sources - prints, engravings, book illustrations - the embroiderers drew on for their patterns, and it includes the first full catalogue raisonne of all the known embroideries created by these two remarkable women."--BOOK JACKET.

Emblems in the visual arts use motifs which have meanings, and in Emblems in Scotland Michael Bath, leading authority on Renaissance emblem books, shows how such symbolic motifs address major historical issues of Anglo-Scottish relations, the Reformation of the Church and the Union of the Crowns. Emblems are enigmas, and successive chapters ask for instance: Why does a late-medieval rood-screen show a jester at the Crucifixion? Why did Elizabeth I send Mary Queen of Scots tapestries showing the power of women to build a feminist City of God? Why did a presbyterian minister of Stirling decorate his manse with hieroglyphics? And why in the twentieth-century did Ian Hamilton Finlay publish a collection of Heroic Emblems?

Opera developed during a time when the position of women—their rights and freedoms, their virtues and vices, and even the most basic substance of their sexuality—was constantly debated. Many of these controversies manifested themselves in the representation of the historical and mythological women whose voices were heard on the Venetian operatic stage. Drawing upon a complex web of early modern sources and ancient texts, this engaging study is the first comprehensive treatment of women, gender, and sexuality in seventeenth-century opera. Wendy Heller explores the operatic manifestations of female chastity, power, transvestism, androgyny, and desire, showing how the emerging genre was shaped by and infused with the Republic's taste for the erotic and its ambivalent attitudes toward women and sexuality. Heller begins by examining contemporary Venetian writings about gender and sexuality that influenced the development of female vocality in opera. The Venetian reception and transformation of ancient texts—by Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus, and Diodorus Siculus—form the background for her penetrating analyses of the musical and dramatic representation of five extraordinary women as presented in operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Francesco Cavalli, and their successors in Venice: Dido, queen of Carthage (Cavalli); Octavia, wife of Nero (Monteverdi); the nymph Callisto (Cavalli); Queen Semiramis of Assyria (Pietro Andrea Ziani); and Messalina, wife of Claudius (Carlo Pallavicino).

The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. Pens and Needles is the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication. Because early modern people saw verbal and visual texts as closely related, Susan Frye discusses the connections between the many forms of women's textualities, including notes in samplers, alphabets both stitched and penned, initials, ciphers, and extensive texts like needlework pictures, self-portraits, poetry, and pamphlets, as well as commissioned artwork, architecture, and interior design. She examines works on paper and cloth by such famous figures as Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bess of Hardwick, as well as the output of journeywomen needleworkers and miniaturists Levina Teerlinc and Esther Inglis, and their lesser-known sisters in the English colonies of the New World. Frye shows how traditional women's work was a way for women to communicate with one another and to shape their own identities within familial, intellectual, religious, and historical traditions. Pens and Needles offers insights into women's lives and into such literary texts as Shakespeare's Othello and Cymbeline and Mary Sidney Wroth's Urania.

This study examines representations of early modern female consorts and regnants via extra-literary emblematics such as paintings, jewelry, miniature portraits, carvings, placards, masques, funerary monuments, and imprese.