The Name of a Queen William Fleetwood's Itinerarium ad Windsor

William Fleetwood's Itinerarium ad Windsor is one of the most unusual and intriguing contributions to the sixteenth-century controversy over whether a woman could rightfully rule England. In this essay, author William Fleetwood - antiquarian, historian, and City Recorder of London - described a conversation during a leisurely horseback ride from London to Windsor in March, 1575, shared by Fleetwood, Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, during which the trio collectively offered a crisp and lucid discussion of the theoretical as well as the constitutional relationship between female rule and the English monarchy. This critical edition and the accompanying contextual essays will make available to scholars and students alike this remarkable discussion of the form and nature of English regnant queenship, which provides a valuable tool for gaining a greater understanding of contemporary notions of and underlying fears concerning the efficacy and desirability of female rule in Elizabethan England.

Charles Beem is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Pembroke, USA. He is the author of The Lioness Roared: The Problems of Female Rule in English History (2006) and the editor of The Royal Minorities of Medieval and Early Modern England (2008) and The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I (2011).

 

Dennis Moore recently retired as Chair of the Department of Rhetoric at the University of Iowa, where he taught rhetoric and Renaissance studies. Much of his research centers on the sixteenth-century controversy over whether a woman could rightfully rule England, with special attention to the longest and most learned contribution to the debate, Lord Henry Howard's Dutiful Defense of the Lawful Regiment of Women (1590).

PART I: THE DIALOGUE
1. William Fleetwood's Itinerarium ad Windsor; Dennis Moore
PART II: THE SPEAKERS
2. William Fleetwood and the Itinerarium; Charles Beem
3. Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the Itinerarium; Jacqueline Vanhoutte
4. Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, and the Itinerarium; Rivkah Zim
PART III: THE ITINERARIUM AD WINDSOR AS HISTORY
5. William Fleetwood: Historical Researcher and Scholar; James Alsop
6. The Itinerarium and Sixteenth Century English Queenship; Carole Levin and Charles Beem
7. The Itinerarium and Marian Historiography; Sarah Duncan
8. Without Precedent: Mary I, the Itinerarium, and the Act for Regal Power; Anna Whitelock