Publisher Description

Introduced by a brief examination of the anonymous seventeenth-century miniature painting used on the book's jacket and frontispiece, essays in Resurrecting Elizabeth I in Seventeenth-Century England combine literary and cultural analysis to show how and why images of Elizabeth Tudor appeared so widely in the century after her death and how those images were modified as the century progressed. The volume includes work by Steven W. May (on quotations and misquotations of Elizabeth's own words), Alan R. Young (on the Phoenix Queen and her successor, James I), Georgianna Ziegler (on Elizabeth's goddaughter, Elizabeth of Bohemia), Jonathan Baldo (on forgetting Elizabeth in Henry VIII), Lisa Gim (on Anna Maria van Schurman and Anne Bradstreet's visions of Elizabeth as an exemplary woman), and Kim H. Noling (on John Banks' creation of a maternal genealogy for English Protestantism).

This collection offers readers a timely encounter with the historical experience of people adapting to a pandemic emergency and the corresponding narrative representation of that crisis, as early modern writers transformed the plague into literature. The essays examine the impact of the plague on health, politics, and religion as well as on the plays, prose fiction, and plague bills that stand as witnesses to the experience of a society devastated by contagious disease. Readers will find physicians and moralists wrestling with the mysteries of the disease; erotic escapades staged in plague-time plays; the poignant prose works of William Bullein and Thomas Dekker; the bodies of monarchs who sought to protect themselves from plague; the chameleon-like nature of the plague as literal disease and as metaphor; and future strains of plague, literary and otherwise, which we may face in the globally-minded, technology-dependent, and ecologically-awakened twenty-first century. The bubonic plague compelled change in all aspects of lived experience in Early Modern England, but at the same time, it opened space for writers to explore new ideas and new literary forms—not all of them somber or horrifying and some of them downright hilarious. By representing the plague for their audiences, these writers made an epidemic calamity intelligible: for them, the dreaded disease could signify despair but also hope, bewilderment but also a divine plan, quarantine but also liberty, death but also new life.

This richly illustrated and interdisciplinary study examines the commercial mediation of royalism through print and visual culture from the second half of the seventeenth century. The rapidly growing marketplace of books, periodicals, pictures, and material objects brought the spectacle of monarchy to a wide audience, saturating spaces of daily life in later Stuart and early Hanoverian England. Images of the royal family, including portrait engravings, graphic satires, illustrations, medals and miniatures, urban signs, playing cards, and coronation ceramics were fundamental components of the political landscape and the emergent public sphere. Koscak considers the affective subjectivities made possible by loyalist commodities; how texts and images responded to anxieties about representation at moments of political uncertainty; and how individuals decorated, displayed, and interacted with pictures of rulers. Despite the fractious nature of party politics and the appropriation of royal representations for partisan and commercial ends, print media, images, and objects materialized emotional bonds between sovereigns and subjects as the basis of allegiance and obedience. They were read and re-read, collected and exchanged, kept in pockets and pasted to walls, and looked upon as repositories of personal memory, national history, and political reverence.

Offering evidence of women's extensive contributions to the theatrical landscape, this volume sharply challenges the assumption that the stage was 'all male' in early modern England. The editors and contributors argue that the pervasiveness of female performance affected cultural production, even on the professional London stages that used men and boys for women's parts. English spectators saw women players in professional and amateur contexts, in elite and popular settings, at home and abroad. Women acted in scripted and improvised roles, performed in local festive drama, and took part in dancing, singing, and masquing. English travelers saw professional actresses on the continent and Italian and French actresses visited England. Essays in this volume explore: the impact of women players outside London; the relationship between women's performance on the continent and in England; working women's participation in a performative culture of commerce; the importance of the visual record; the use of theatrical techniques by queens and aristocrats for political ends; and the role of female performance on the imitation of femininity. In short, Women Players in England 1500-1660 shows that women were dynamic cultural players in the early modern world.

In Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England, Carole Levin and Robert Bucholz provide a forum for the underexamined, anomalous reigns of queens in history. These regimes, primarily regarded as interruptions to the ?normal? male monarchy, have been examined largely as isolated cases. This interdisciplinary study of queens throughout history examines their connections to one another, their constituents? perceptions of them, and the fallacies of their historical reputations. The contributors consider historical queens as well as fictional, mythic, and biblical queens and how they were represented in medieval and early modern England. They also give modern readers a glimpse into the early modern worldview, particularly regarding order, hierarchy, rulership, property, biology, and the relationship between the sexes. Considering topics as diverse as how Queen Elizabeth?s unmarried status affected the perception of her as a just and merciful queen to a reevaluation of ?good Queen Anne? as more than just an obese, conventional monarch, this volume encourages readers to reexamine previously held assumptions about the role of female monarchs in early modern history.

This collection examines the afterlives of early modern English and French rulers. Spanning five centuries of cultural memory, the volume offers case studies of how kings and queens were remembered, represented, and reincarnated in a wide range of sources, from contemporary pageants, plays, and visual art to twenty-first-century television, and from premodern fiction to manga and romance novels. With essays on well-known figures such as Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette as well as lesser-known monarchs such as Francis II of France and Mary Tudor, Queen of France, Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France brings together reflections on how rulers live on in collective memory.

On the night of November 4th 1605, the English authorities uncovered an alleged plot by a group of discontented Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the lords, princes, queen and king in attendance. The failure of the plot is celebrated to this day and is known as Guy Fawkes Day. In Poets, Players and Preachers, Anne James explores the literary responses to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in poetry, drama, and sermons. This book is the first full-length study of the literary repercussions of the conspiracy. By analyzing the genres of poems, plays, and sermons produced between 1605 and 1688, the author argues that not only did the continuous reinterpretation of the conspiracy serve religious and political purposes but that such literary reinterpretations produced generic changes.

This interdisciplinary collection by historians, cultural critics and literary scholars examines a variety of the political, social, and cultural forces at work during the English Renaissance and beyond, forces that contributed to creating a wealth of artistic, literary and historical impressions of Elizabeth, her court, and the time period named after her, the Elizabethan age. Articles in the collection discuss Elizabeths' relationships, investigate the advice given her, explore connections between her court and the arts, and consider the role of Elizabeth's court in the political life of the nation. Some of the ways Elizabeth was understood and represented demonstrate society's fears and ambivalence about early modern women in power, while others celebrate her successes as England's first and only unmarried queen regnant. This volume will be of interest to scholars and students in a wide range of disciplines, including literary, cultural, historical and women's studies, as well as those interested in the life and times of Elizabeth I.

This book is the only book-length monograph comparing the impact of confessional identity on both halves of the Wittelsbach dynasty which provided Bavarian dukes and German emperors as well as its implications for late Renaissance court culture. It demonstrates that religious conflict led to the development of distinctly confessional court cultures among the main Wittelsbach courts. Likewise, it illuminates how these confessional court cultures contributed significantly to the splintering of Renaissance humanism along religious lines in this era. Concomitantly, it sheds new light on the impact of late medieval dynastic competition on shaping the early modern Wittelsbach courts as well as the important role of Wittelsbach women in the creation and continuation of dynastic piety in their roles as wives, mothers, and patronesses of the arts.