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.

Examines early modern queens as they influenced emerging nationalist ambitions through a multidisciplinary lens Wrestles with racialization, transnational, and peninsular politics in queenship studies Provides a broad study of the historical and imaginary queens deployed and created by early modern English politics

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.

Klappentext

"'The Queen's Gambit' offers a substantial and striking collection of essays that explores the role of royal women (real and literary) in shaping English political nationalisms, and represents valuable reading for anyone interested in power, gender, and politics in the early modern period."
Dr. Elizabeth Williamson, University of Exeter, UK

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.

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.- The Queen Moves.- Chapter 2. Black Stitch, Dark Skin, and English Ale: Catherine of Aragon as the First Foreign Tudor Princess.- Chapter 3. Pandora's Book: English Bible, English Crown in Katherine Parr's Lamentations.- Chapter 4. Her Name in Parchment: Signing Queens in Tudor England.- Chapter 5. The blackest nation of the world: Female Authority and Patronage in The Masque of Blackness and Beauty.- Blocking the Queen.- Chapter 6. Constructing Queenship: Elizabeth of York in Tudor Court Poetry.- Chapter 7. Historiography's Gambits: French Queens in the Chronicle Abridgments of Richard Grafton and John Stow.- Chapter 8. 'Now iudge Englischmen if it be gud to change Quenis': Constructing English National Identity in Elizabethan Propaganda Against Mary Queen of Scots.- Chapter 9. La Vie Boheme: The International Girlhood of Elizabeth Stuart.- Queening a Pawn.- Chapter 10. Shylock's Monkeys and the 1569 English Lottery.- Chapter 11. Neither two nor one was called: Sovereign Death and Trans Rebirth in The Phoenix and Turtle.- Chapter 12. The Only Good Queen is an English Queen? Theorizing Queenship in Titus Andronicus and Antony and Cleopatra.- Chapter 13. I have forsworn his bed and the mother wills it so: Exploring Queen Consorts' Marital, Sexual, and Reproductive Consent in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam.- Chapter 14. Reproducing the Nation: Royal Wombs in King Henry VIII.- End-Game: The Modern Gambit.- Chapter 15. Curating a Conduit: Elizabeth Stuart, Motherhood, and National Identity in Heritage Sites.