Books in the Queenship and Power series

Scholars and Poets Talk About Queens is a lively and erudite collection, unusual in an especially appealing way.

This is the first edition ever of the Queen¿s correspondence in Italian. These letters cast a new light on her talents as a linguist and provide interesting details as to her political agenda, and on the cultural milieu of her court. This book provides a fresh analysis of the surviving evidence concerning Elizabeth¿s learning and use of Italian, and of the activity of the members of her ¿Foreign Office.¿ All of the documents transcribed here are accompanied by a short introduction focusing on their content and context, a brief description of their transmission history, and an English translation.

This book compares two successful, elite women, Empress Adelheid (931-999) and Countess Matilda (1046-1115), for their relative ability to retain their wealth and power in the midst of the profound social changes of the eleventh century.

Of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, fifteen include queens. Essays span Shakespeare's career and cover a range of famous and lesser-known queens, from the furious Margaret of Anjou in the Henry VI plays to the quietly powerful Hermione in The Winter's Tale;

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.

Of Shakespeare's thirty-seven plays, fifteen include queens. Essays span Shakespeare's career and cover a range of famous and lesser-known queens, from the furious Margaret of Anjou in the Henry VI plays to the quietly powerful Hermione in The Winter's Tale;

An examination of fifteenth-century British queens through literature and history.

This book tells the story of the queen whose marriage to King Henry VII ended England's Wars of the Roses and inaugurated the 118-year Tudor dynasty. Best known as the mother of Henry VIII and grandmother of Elizabeth I, this Queen Elizabeth contributed far beyond the act of giving birth to future monarchs.

Itinerarium ad Windsor concerns a central question of the Elizabethan era: Why should a woman be allowed to rule with the same powers as a king?

During the Elizabethan era, writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and others frequently expounded on mercy, exploring the sources and outcomes of clemency. This fresh reading of such depictions shows that the concept of mercy was a contested one, directly shaped by tensions over the exercise of judgment by a woman on the throne.

For scholars of medieval and early modern women, they offer a unique vantage point from which to study the intersections of elite women and popular understandings of the premodern world.

This book explores the relationship between Queen Caroline, one of the most enigmatic characters in Regency England, and Sir William Gell, the leading classical scholar of his day.

Royal Mothers and their Ruling Children: Wielding Political Authority from Antiquity to the Early Modern Era brings together a range of case studies from the Pre-Modern era to illustrate key themes with regard to motherhood, ambition and authority, with a focus on queens and elite women who are at the political heart of their respective realms.

Itinerarium ad Windsor concerns a central question of the Elizabethan era: Why should a woman be allowed to rule with the same powers as a king?

Berenice II Euergetis (267/6-221 BCE), the daughter of King Magas of Cyrene (Libya) and wife of King Ptolemy III of Egypt, was queen at an important juncture in Hellenistic history. This collection of four essays focuses on aspects of chronology, genealogy and marital practices, royal ideology and queenship.

This collection addresses royal motherhood across Europe, from both the medieval and Early Modern periods, including (in)famous and not-so-famous royal mothers.

This work offers a new portrayal of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples as a woman of power with weaknesses and ambitions, and analyzes the Queen's actions, from her political choices to her alliance and betrayals.

This book surveys a large and rarely examined body of early modern poems, plays, and prose works written to commemorate Queen Elizabeth I.

This book examines Elizabeth's correspondence with several significant rulers, analyzing how her letters were constructed, drafted and presented, the rhetorical strategies used, and the role these letters played in facilitating diplomatic relations.

This book is an innovative study offering the first examination of how three fourteenth-century English queens, Margaret of France, Isabella of France, and Philippa of Hainault, exercised power and authority. It frames its analysis around four major themes: gender; status; the concept of the crown; and power and authority.

Charles Beem uses Gender Studies and political and constitutional History to examine the problems faced by female rulers throughout British history, from the twelfth century Empress Matilda's imaginative efforts to become England's first regnant queen, to Queen Victoria's remarkable exercise of political power during the Bedchamber Crisis of 1839.

Charles Beem uses Gender Studies and political and constitutional History to examine the problems faced by female rulers throughout British history, from the twelfth century Empress Matilda's imaginative efforts to become England's first regnant queen, to Queen Victoria's remarkable exercise of political power during the Bedchamber Crisis of 1839.

In its application of theories of the meaning of the face and its exploration of the early modern representation and interpretation of faces, this study argues that the face was seen as a rhetorical tool and that Elizabeth was a master of using her face to persuade, threaten, or comfort her subjects.

This groundbreaking collection explores the key roles that Mediterranean queens played as wives, as mothers, and above all as political actors. Ranging from Byzantine empresses to regnants and consorts in the Italian peninsula, they offer a bracing new perspective on queenship in the medieval and Early Modern eras.

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.

This groundbreaking book combines literary interpretation, gender analysis, and cultural, political, and diplomatic history to examine how Elizabeth I used the discourse of love to establish her political power, assert her right to marry or not, and rule the country herself either way.

This book examines female lordship and the power of the political voice in medieval Northern Europe, focusing on three prominent, foreign-born queens of medieval Scandinavia - Agnes of Denmark (d. 1304), Eufemia of Norway (d. 1312) and Margareta of Denmark/Sweden (d. 1412) - who acted as cultural mediators and initiators of political change.

A fresh biography of Mary Tudor which challenges conventional views of her as a weeping hysteric and love-struck romantic, providing instead the portrait of a queen who drew on two sources of authority to increase the power of her position: epistolary conventions and the rhetoric of chivalry that imbued the French and English courts.

This study examines representations of early modern female consorts and regnants via extra-literary emblematics such as paintings, jewelry, miniature portraits, carvings, placards, masques, funerary monuments, and imprese.