High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England Realities and Representations

"High and Mighty Queens" of Early Modern England is a truly interdisciplinary anthology of essays including articles on such actual queen regnants as Mary I and Elizabeth I, and queen consorts such as Anne Boleyn, Anna of Denmark, and Henrietta Maria. The collection also deals with a number of literary representations of earlier historical queens such as Cleopatra, and semi-historical ones such as Gertrude, Tamora, and Lady Macbeth, and such fictional ones as Hermione and the queen of Cymbeline, all of them Shakespeare characters. This fascinating look at Renaissance queens also examines myth and folklore, Romantic or Victorian representations, and the depictions of queens like Catherine de Medici of France in twentieth century film.

Carole Levin is Professor of History at the University of Nebraska and author of The Reign of Elizabeth I.

Debra Barrett-Graves is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Santa Fe.

Jo Eldridge Carney is Assistant Professor of English at the College of New Jersey.

Introduction by Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves * Part One: The Nature of Renaissance Queens * On Education of an Early Modern Queen: Catherine of Aragon, Mary I, and Juan Luis Vives by Timothy G. Elston * Mary I: England's First Renaissance Queen by Judith Richards * Elizabeth as Sacred Monarch by Carole Levin * Unmasquing the Connections between Jacobean Politics and Colonization: Anna of Denmark, Pocahontas, Ben Jonson, and the Start of the English Empire, 1614-1616 by Louis Roper * Negotiating Charles I: Henrietta Maria and Elizabeth of Bohemia in the Late 1620s by Karen Nelson * Part Two: Imaging Renaissance Queens and Power * And a Queen of England, Too: The 'Englishing' of Catherine of Aragon in Sixteenth-Century English Literary and Chronicle History by Matt Hensen * To live eternized in the House of Fame: Renaissance Poets and the Imaging of Queenship by Debra Barrett-Graves * "Whore" Queens: The Sexualized Female Body and the State by Susan Dunn-Hensley * "We Have Been Soldiers": The Amazon Queen in the Works of Shakespeare and Fletcher by Jo Eldridge Carney * "No head eminent above the rest": Female Authority in Othello and The Tempest by Sid Ray * "There's Magic in Thy Magesty": Queenship and Witch-Speak on the Jacobean Stage by Katy Stavreva * Part Three: Cultural Anxieties and Historical Echoes of Renaissance Queens * Mary Queen of Scots as Suffering Woman: Representations by Mary Stuart and William Wordsworth by Joy Currie * Queen Katherine's Dream: Representations of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn in the Victorian Age by Georgianna Ziegler * Anne Boleyn in History, Drama, and Film by Retha Warnicke * Woman in Black: The Image of Catherine de' Medici from Marlowe to Queen Margot by Elaine Kruse * Afterword by Lena Cowen Orlin