Any novelist who deals with Elizabeth I has two problems: a surfeit of detail and a paucity of motive. It’s reasonably easy to find out about the trivia of daily life and to trace the actions of important people; much less easy to figure out why anyone did what they did.
In this new biography of one of the most intriguing figures of early modern European history, Retha Warnicke, widely regarded as the leading historian on Tudor queenship, offers a fresh interpretation of the life of Mary Stewart (Stuart), popularly known as Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary became Queen of Scotland at six days old, was crowned Queen of France at seventeen on the death of her husband Francis II, and was the cousin and rival of Elizabeth I, who ultimately had her executed for treason. A devout Catholic, who lived during an era of intense religious discord, Mary’s turbulent life was characterized by treachery, violence and tragedy.
Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. She's intelligent-she aced AP physics; athletic-a former state-ranked tennis doubles champion; and beautiful. She is, in short, everything her mother, Elizabeth, hoped she could be. The family's move to Landsdale, with stepfather James in tow, hadn't been as bumpy as Elizabeth feared. But as the school year draws to a close, there are disturbing signs that the life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham, and that Elizabeth's hopes for her daughter to remain immune from the pull of the darker impulses of drugs and alcohol are dashed.
The Face of Queenship: Early Modern Representations of Elizabeth I
The Face of Queenship investigates the aesthetic, political, and gender-related meanings in representations of Elizabeth I by her contemporaries. By attending to eyewitness reports, poetry, portraiture, and discourses on beauty and cosmetics, this book shows how the portrayals of the queen’s face register her contemporaries’ hopes, fears, hatreds, mockeries, rivalries, and awe. 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.
The Death of Elizabeth I - Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen
The death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 was greeted by an outpouring of official proclamations, gossip-filled letters, tense diary entries, diplomatic dispatches, and somber sermons. English poets wrote hundreds of elegies to Elizabeth, and playwrights began bringing her onto the stage. This book uses these historical and literary sources, including a maid of honor’s eyewitness account of the explosion of the Queen’s corpse, to provide a detailed history of Elizabeth’s final illness and death, and to show Elizabeth’s subjects—peers and poets, bishops and beggars, women and men—responding to their loss by remembering and reconstructing their Queen.
