Annaliese Connolly & Lisa Hopkins 
Goddesses and Queens [PDF ebook] 
The iconography of Elizabeth I

The visual images of Queen Elizabeth I displayed in contemporary portraits and perpetuated and developed in more recent media, such as film and television, make her one of the most familiar and popular of all British monarchs.

This collection of essays examines the diversity of the queen’s extensive iconographical repertoire, focusing on both visual and textual representations of Elizabeth, not only in portraiture and literature, but also in contemporary sermons, speeches and alchemical treatises. The collection broadens current critical thinking about Elizabeth, as each of the essays contributes to the debate about the ways in which the queen’s developing iconicity was not simply a celebratory mode, but also encoded criticism of her. Each of these essays explains the ways in which the varied representations of Elizabeth reflect the political and cultural anxieties of her subjects

Tabella dei contenuti

Introduction
A world in crisis: Elizabeth’s iconography and religious tensions
1. Elizabeth I as Deborah the Judge: exceptional women of power
Carol Blessing
2. Warlike mates? Queen Elizabeth, and Joan La Pucelle in 1 Henry VI
Ben Spiller
3. ‘Rudenesse it selfe she doth refine’: Queen Elizabeth I as Lady Alchymia
Jayne Archer
Virginia and the Virgin: Elizabeth and the new world
4. Elizabeth I: size matters
Deanne Williams
5. ‘And In Their Midst a Sun’: Petrarch’s triumphs and the Elizabethan icon
Heather Campbell
6. ‘Nature Without Labor’: Virgin Queen and virgin land in Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana
Helen J. Burgess
The old world and the new: classical precedents
7. The dark side of the moon: Semiramis and Titania
Lisa Hopkins
8. A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare’s retrospective on Elizabeth I and the iconography of marriage
Annaliese Connolly
9. Cynthia waning: Cynthia’s Revels imagines the death of the Queen
Matthew Steggle
Coda: Elizabeth’s afterlife
10. ‘Turn thy Tombe into a Throne’: Elizabeth I’s death rehearsal
Scott L. Newstok

Circa l’autore

Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University