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The essays in this book traverse two centuries of queens and their afterlives-historical, mythological, and literary. They speak of the significant and subtle ways that queens leave their mark on the culture they inhabit, focusing on gender, marriage, national identity, diplomacy, and representations of queens in literature. Elizabeth I looms large in this volume, but the interrogation of queenship extends from Elizabeth's historical counterparts, such as Anne Boleyn and Catherine de Medici, to her fictional echoes in the pages of John Lyly, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Mary Wroth, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish. Celebrating and building on the renowned scholarship of Carole Levin, Queens Matter in Early Modern Studies exemplifies a range of innovative approaches to examining women and power in the early modern period 1. Introduction: Studies of Queens in Honor of Carole Levin -- I. Prelude: Studying Queens -- 2. Queenship and Power: The Heart and Stomach of a Book Series -- II. Queens and Matters of Gender -- 3. Did Elizabeth's Gender Really Matter? -- 4. A Great Reckoning in a Little Room: Elizabeth, Essex, and Royal Interruptions -- 5. "We are such stuff": Absolute Feminine Power vs. Cinematic Myth-Making in Julie Taymor's Tempest (2010) -- III. Queens and Marriage -- 6. Elizabeth I and the Marriage Crisis, John Lyly's Campaspe, and the Politics of Court Drama -- 7. Tudor Consorts: The Politics of Royal Matchmaking, 1483-1543 -- 8. The Queen's Deathbed Wish in Early Modern Fairy Tales: Securing the Dynasty -- IV. Queens and Religion -- 9. Spenser's Dragon Fight and the English Queen: The Struggle over the Elizabethan Settlement -- 10. Anne Boleyn's Legacy to Elizabeth I: Neoclassicism and the Iconography of Protestant Queenship -- 11. "A Network of Honor and Obligation": Elizabeth as Godmother -- V. Queens, National Identity, and Diplomacy -- 12. Lesbianism in Early Modern Vernacular Romance: The Question of Historicity -- 13. Doppelgänger Queens: Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart -- 14. Elizabeth I and the Politics of Invoking Russia in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost -- 15. Queen Elizabeth I and Elizabethan Court in the French Ambassador's Eyes -- VI. Inspired by the Queen: Queens in Literature -- 16. Queen of Love-Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Wroth -- 17. Dressing Queens (and Some Others): Signifying through Clothing in Wroth's Countess of Montgomery's Urania -- 18. Conjuring Three Queens and an Empress: The Philosophy of Enchantment in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World
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