Abstract
With effusive approbation, Roger Ascham lauds Queen Elizabeth I as a paragon of learning—a royal “mayd” whose work ethic and exceptional skill in languages should prompt all “Ientlemen of England” to emulate her. In part, one could argue that Ascham’s praise stemmed largely from self-interest. He had been, after all, one of the queen’s tutors, and he was currently serving as her Latin secretary. As Learned Queen will demonstrate, however, Ascham was among countless individuals who would extol Elizabeth as a queen of superlative wisdom. The glimpses he provides of her engaged in study suggest why this royal image became so popular. Elizabeth and her subjects would evoke her learning in order to assert and bolster her royal authority in ecclesiastical affairs as well as international relations.
It is your shame, (I speake to you all, you yong lentlemen of England) that one mayd should go beyond you all, in excellencie of learnyng, and knowledge of diuers tonges. Pointe forth six of the best giuen Ientlemen of this Court, and all they together, shew not so much good will, spend not so much tyme, bestow not so many houres, dayly orderly, & constantly, for the increase of learning & knowledge, as doth the Queenes Maiestie her selfe.
Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, Hir
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Notes
A few essay-length studies have acknowledged Elizabeth’s learned persona as an important strategy of royal image-making. These studies include Lysbeth Benkert, “Translation as Image-Making: Elizabeth I’s Translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy” Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January 2001): 2.1–20. http:///extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/06-3/benkboet.htm
Georgia E. Brown, “Translation and the definition of sovereignty: the case of Elizabeth Tudor,” in Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century: Selected Papers from the Second International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (2000), ed. Mike Pincombe, 88–103 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)
Jennifer Clement, “The Queen’s Voice: Elizabeth I’s Christian Prayers and Meditations,” Early Modern Literary Studies 13.3 (January 2008): 1.1–26. http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/13-3/clemquee.htm
Mary Thomas Crane, “‘Video et Taceo’: Elizabeth I and the Rhetoric of Counsel,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 28.1 (1988): 1–16
Janet M. Green, “Queen Elizabeth I’s Latin Reply to the Polish Ambassador,” Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (Winter 2000): 987–1008
Constance Jordan, “States of Blindness: Doubt, Justice, and Constancy in Elizabeth I’s ‘Avec l’aveugler si estrange,’” in Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, ed. Peter C. Herman, 109–33 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002)
Steven W. May, “Queen Elizabeth Prays for the Living and the Dead,” in Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing, ed. Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo, 201–11 (London: British Library, 2007)
Steven W. May and Anne Lake Prescott, “The French Verses of Elizabeth I,” English Literary Renaissance 24.1 (1994): 9–43
James E. Phillips, “Elizabeth I as a Latin Poet: An Epigram on Paul Melissus,” Renaissance News 16 (Winter 1963): 289–98
Linda Shenk, “Turning Learned Authority into Royal Supremacy: Elizabeth I’s Learned Persona and Her University Orations,” in Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman, ed. Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves, 78–96 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003).
Editors Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus highlight the need for their collection, Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals (henceforth ACFLO), and they emphasize their hope that it will raise awareness of—and appreciation for—Elizabeth’s skills as a multilingual queen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. xxv–xxvi.
see Elizabeth I: Collected Works (henceforth CW), ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589, ed. Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Elizabeth I: Translations, 1592–1598, ed. Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009)
Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works, ed. Steven W. May (New York: Washington Square, 2004).
A few of the works that have been most influential in my research on humanism and, in many cases, its relation to early modern polity include: Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Warren Boutcher, “Humanism and Literature in Late Tudor England: Translation, the Continental Book and the Case of Montaigne’s Essais,” in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Woolfson, 243–68 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
Rebecca W. Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996)
Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth-and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986)
John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Arthur F. Kinney, Continental Humanist Poetics: Studies in Erasmus, Castiglione, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, and Cervantes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989)
Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986)
A. N. McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Mike Pincombe, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century (Harlow, England: Longman, 2001)
Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s “Arcadia” and Elizabethan Politics (London: Yale University Press, 1996).
See especially Desiderius Erasmus’ The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath, ed. Lisa Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Collinson, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 69.2 (1986-7): 394–424.
Lake, “‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’ (and the Fall of Archbishop Grindal) Revisited,” in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. John F. McDiarmid, 129–47 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
At present, the politics of Elizabeth’s and Edward’s educations are starting to receive more scholarly attention. Aysha Pollnitz is currently working on a monograph that examines the politics surrounding the educations of Tudor and Stuart princes, and she includes a chapter on Elizabeth. Stephen Alford and Charles Beem include Edward VI’s educated persona as a crucial element of the young king’s royal identity. Pollnitz, Princely Education in Sixteenth-Century Britain (in progress); Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign ofEdwardVI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Beem, “‘Have Not Wee a Noble Kynge?’: The Minority of Edward VI,” in The Royal Minorities of Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Charles Beem, 211–48 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 218–20.
In fact, Elizabeth’s pious learning was publicly showcased even before she ascended the throne. John Bale published her translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse from Geneva in 1548. Therefore, when England and continental Europe first “heard” Elizabeth’s voice, it was the voice of a well-educated, pious princess. Bale published Elizabeth’s translation under the title A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle. Marc Shell pro-vides Elizabeth’s text and Bale’s version of it in Elizabeth’s Glass (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).
McLaren specifically (and rightly) describes the image of the philosopher-monarch as masculine in Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I, p. 14. Two other works that provide significant studies of women and humanism are Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities, chapter 2; and Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes toward Learned Women in the Renaissance,” in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay, 107–25 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985).
Of Love andSelf-Love in Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers, 61–68 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 64.
Recent trends in the scholarship on Sidney and Essex, for example, are greatly influenced by Paul E. J. Hammer and Alan Stewart, who foreground the intellectual and transnational priorities of these courtiers but downplay the language of love as too queen-focused (an approach typically adopted by literary scholars such as Catherine Bates, Katherine Duncan-Jones, and others). Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Stewart, Philip Sidney: A Double Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000)
Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtshipin Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
Green, “Phronesis Feminised: Prudence From Christine de Pizan to Elizabeth I,” in Virtue, Liberty, and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women, 1400–1800, ed. Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green, 23–38 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), p. 32.
Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 97.
Campbell, “‘And in their midst a sun’: Petrarch’s Triumphs and the Elizabethan Icon,” in Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I, ed. Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins, 19–33 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007)
Doran, “Virginity, Divinity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I,” in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 171–99 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 186–88
Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 112–18.
Spain was using its colonial empire to fund its military operations, and this gathering strength was sure to be turned against England, as would be the case in 1588. See Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and Foreign Policy, 1558–1603 (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 39.
A few examples of these studies include Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989)
Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)
Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995)
Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
This paradigm is closely related to the interdisciplinary and wide-ranging work that Carole Levin provides in her “The Heart and Stomach of a King”: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).
Mears, Queenship and Political Discourse in the Elizabethan Realms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
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© 2010 Linda Shenk
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Shenk, L. (2010). Introduction. In: Learned Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101852_1
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