Elizabeth I's Foreign Correspondence Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics

Elizabeth I's linguistic skills were never in doubt during her lifetime, and she put them to excellent use when she became Queen. Although she never left England, throughout her reign she wrote extensively to correspondents abroad, and her extant foreign correspondence ranges from the ceremonial to the religiously committed to the intimate and emotionally vulnerable. The relationships Elizabeth forged through these texts were of central importance to the diplomacy and politics of the period. This volume presents the findings of a major international research project on the Queen's correspondence, and includes newly edited texts and translations of nine of Elizabeth's holograph letters in foreign languages.

Carlo M. Bajetta is Professor of English at Università della Valle d'Aosta, Italy. He is a contributor to The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, and his publications Sir Walter Ralegh (1998); Whole volumes in folio (2000); Some notes on Printing and Publishing in Renaissance Venice (2000), and, with Luisa Camaiora, Shakespearean Readings: Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley (2004).
 
Guillaume Coatalen is a Senior Lecturer on early modern English literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, France. He has published editions of verse and commonplace books in manuscript and has written on Elizabeth I's correspondence in French.
Jonathan Gibson is a Lecturer in the English Department at The Open University, UK. He is the co-editor of two books on early modern women's manuscripts and the author of published essays on early modern letters, on the physical structure and the editing of miscellany manuscripts, on the translations and handwriting of Elizabeth I, and on Elizabethan and Jacobean translations from Latin, French, and Italian sources.

1. Manuscripts, Secretaries, and Scribes: The Production of Diplomatic Letters at Court; Angela Andreani

PART I: ELIZABETH'S FRENCH CORRESPONDENCE

2. Twelve Unpublished Holograph Letters in French from Elizabeth I to the Duke of Anjou: Texts and Analysis; Guillaume Coatalen

3. Structure and Epistolary Rhetoric in Elizabeth's French Correspondence; Jonathan Gibson

PART II: ELIZABETH'S ITALIAN CORRESPONDENCE

4. "Perfit readiness": Elizabeth Learning and Using Italian; Alessandra Petrina

5. Three Holograph Italian Letters from Elizabeth I to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor: Texts and Analysis; Carlo M. Bajetta

6. Elizabeth's Italian: Linguistic Standards and Interlingual Interference; Gianmario Raimondi

7. Elizabeth's Italian: Rhetorical and Semantic Constructions; Giuliana Iannaccaro

PART III: CORRESPONDENCE WITH GERMANY, THE EAST, AND IRELAND

8. Elizabeth's Correspondence with the Protestant Princes of the Empire, 1558-1586; David Scott Gehring

9. The Virgin Queen and the Son of Heaven: Elizabeth I's Letters to Wan-li, Emperor of China; Rayne Allinson

10. Elizabeth's letters to Ireland; Monica Santini