This book encounters the figure of the royal woman in the early modern period and explores how she enables and complicates the key moment at which England was emerging as an ideology, a nation, and an empire. Queens and queens consort, historical and fictional, played crucial roles in Renaissance England s shifting ideologies of nationalist identity. This collection considers how a series of royal women particularly embodied and complicated these many self-constructions of England and complex renditions of the other.

The period s influential female monarchs certainly made the queen s political body more visibly politicized, repatriated, and racialized; these same historical royals were represented as icons of nationalism in many forms and functions. In fictional incarnations, royal women created by the English imagination symbolized and structured those same nation-building narratives. This volume studies royal women s writings alongside such depictions of royal women, especially as such works collectively enable emergent English ideologies of nationalism and racialization.

Autorentext

Elizabeth Hodgson is a Professor in the Department of English Language & Literatures at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She specializes in early modern poetry and prose, gender politics and spiritual cultures.

Sarah Crover is a Professor in the Department of English at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, Canada. She works on the eco-cultural history of the Thames, London theatre, Tudor queens and civic identity.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction: Elizabeth Hodgson, Sarah Crover.- Part I: The Queen Moves.- Chapter 2. Maria Prendergast, Englishing Catherine of Aragon .- Chapter 3. Elizabeth Hodgson, Pandora s Book: English Bible, English Crown in Katherine Parr s Lamentations .- Chapter 4. Lanier Walker, My Name in Parchment : Signing Queens in Tudor England .- Chapter 5. Laura Schechter, the blackest nation : Female Authority and Patronage in The Masques of Blackness and Beauty .- Part 2: Blocking the Queen.- Chapter 6. Ágnes Juhász-Ormsby, Elizabeth of York in Tudor Court Poetry .- Chapter 7. Allison Machlis Meyer, Historiography s Gambits: French Queens in The Chronicle Abridgments of Richard Grafton and John Stow .- Chapter 8. Emily Hay, Now iudge Englischmen if it be gud to change Quenis : Constructing English National Identity in Elizabethan Propaganda Against Mary Queen of Scots .- Chapter 9. Deanne Williams, The International Girlhood of Elizabeth Stuart .- Part 3: Queening a Pawn.- Chapter 10. Michelle Ephraim, Shylock s Monkeys and the 1567 English Lottery .- Chapter 11. Don Rodrigues, Neither two nor one was called : Sovereign Death and Trans Rebirth in The Phoenix and Turtle .- Chapter 12. Sarah Crover, The Only Good Queen is an English Queen? Theorizing Queenship in Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra .- Chapter 13. E. Rose Grant, I have forsworne his Bed and The Mother Wills It So : Queen Consorts Marital, Sexual, and Reproductive Consent in Shakespeare s Titus Andronicus and Cary s Tragedy of Mariam .- Chapter 14. Elizabeth Steinway, Reproducing the Nation: Royal Wombs in Henry VIII .- End-Game: The Modern Gambit.- Chapter 15. Amy Sanders, Elizabeth Stuart: A Conduit Curated .