An important re-evaluation of Elizabethan politics and Elizabeth's queenship in sixteenth-century England, Wales and Ireland.

An important re-evaluation of Elizabethan politics and Elizabeth's queenship in sixteenth-century England, Wales and Ireland.

This book brings together a selection of recent, cutting-edge research which, for the first time, challenges commonplace arguments about Mary and Elizabeth's relative successes or failures in order to rethink Tudor queenship.

English Reformation culture centred on 'the word preached'. Throughout this period, the most important public pulpit was Paul's Cross. This book provides a detailed history of the Paul's Cross sermons, exploring how they were delivered and the tensions between the authorities who controlled them.

The discourse of political counsel in early modern Europe depended on the participation of men, as both counsellors and counselled. Women were often thought too irrational or imprudent to give or receive political advice—but they did in unprecedented numbers, as this volume shows. These essays trace the relationship between queenship and counsel through over three hundred years of history. Case studies span Europe, from Sweden and Poland-Lithuania via the Habsburg territories to England and France, and feature queens regnant, consort and regent, including Elizabeth I of England, Catherine Jagiellon of Sweden, Catherine de’ Medici and Anna of Denmark. They draw on a variety of innovative sources to recover evidence of queenly counsel, from treatises and letters to poetry, masques and architecture. For scholars of history, politics and literature in early modern Europe, this book enriches our understanding of royal women as political actors.

The first sustained consideration of the roles played by Elizabeth and by the Irish in shaping relations between the realms.

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.