An exploration of the importation of French political thought into England during the last decades of Elizabeth's reign. The French Religious Wars generated a large body of political propaganda from the Huguenots, the Politiques (a Huguenot-Catholic confederacy) and the Catholic League. Dr. Parmelee discusses how, in the last decades of the reign ofElizabeth I some 130 translated documents were imported into England, most of them - originating from the Politiques, written in support of the Protestant Henry of Navarre's accession to the French throne-advocating religious tolerance as a way to peace. She argues that while most English political thinkers did not openly embrace or articulate the absolutist ideas often expressed in these writings, they had a wide impact on political discourse in the lateElizabethan period. They were useful against foreign enemies, Catholic recusants and Presbyterians, but particularly, in a time of fear of civil war engendered by an unsettled succession, they helped to establish an intellectualclimate conducive to the later development of Stuart absolutism. Dr. Lisa Ferraro Parmelee teaches in the Department of History at Villanova University.

This book examines the first thirty years of Elizabeth I’s reign from the perspective of the Valois kings, Charles IX and Henri III of France. Estelle Paranque sifts through hundreds of French letters and ambassadorial reports to construct a fuller picture of early modern Anglo-French relations, highlighting key events such as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the imprisonment and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the victory of England over the Spanish Armada in 1588. By drawing on a wealth of French sources, she illuminates the French royal family’s shifting perceptions of Elizabeth I and suggests new conclusions about her reign.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the 6th International Conference of the Tudor Symposium, held at the University of Sheffield in 2009. It brings together new explorations of Tudor literature from scholars based all over Europe: France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The papers cover the long mid-Tudor period, from Skelton and more to the young Shakespeare, but with a central emphasis on the middle decades of the sixteenth century. Topics range widely from philosophy and social commentary to more traditionally literary kinds of writing, such as lyric and tragedy (both dramatic and non-dramatic). The volume as a whole offers an attractively kaleidoscopic image of the variety of new work being carried out in the area in the new millennium.

This volume exposes the contested history of a virtue so central to modern disciplines and public discourse that it can seem universal. The essays gathered here, however, demonstrate the emergence of impartiality. From the early seventeenth century, the new epithet ‘impartial’ appears prominently in a wide range of publications. Contributors trace impartiality in various fields: from news publications and polemical pamphlets to moral philosophy and historical dictionaries, from poetry and drama to natural history, in a broad European context and against the backdrop of religious and civil conflicts. Cumulatively, the volume suggests that the emergence of impartiality is implicated in the period’s epochal shifts in epistemology and science, religious and political discourse, print culture, and scholarship. Contributors include: Jörg Jochen Berns, Tamás Demeter, Derek Dunne, Anne Eusterschulte, Christine Gerrard, Rainer Godel, N.J.S. Hardy, Rhodri Lewis, Hanns-Peter Neumann, Joad Raymond, Bernd Roling, Bastian Ronge, Richard Scholar, Nathaniel Stogdill, Anita Traninger, and Anja Zimmermann.

Taking a wide-ranging intertextual approach, Richard Hillman sets Early Modern English play-texts against political and cultural discourses concerning France, as these informed contemporary English consciousness. The English works explored go beyond those directly representing French affairs; the French examples include dramatic treatments of Joan of Arc and of the assassination of the Guises by Henri III. In addition to its fresh readings of some familiar plays, the book proposes, as unique to the English-French dynamic, a theoretical model relating history, discourse and subjectivity.

Publishes English writings in French on France, and especially its nobility, during the 1580s.