Abstract
During the apocalyptic 1580s when writers hailed Elizabeth I as a Protestant Queen of God’s Word, Elizabeth herself projected a very different learned persona. In her self-depiction, gone were the swords, the high drama, and even her decidedly Protestant identity. Instead, she portrayed herself as a philosopher-queen whose broad range of studies gave her the perspective necessary to transcend myopic sectarian divisions. This transcendent wisdom would serve Elizabeth well in the 1580s and 1590s—a period when her own nation and indeed all of Europe were becoming increasingly polarized along religious lines.
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Notes
Elizabeth’s French verses are included in Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals (henceforth ACFLO), ed. Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 85–94.
Elizabeth I: Collected Works (henceforth CW), ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 182.
Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel draw attention to this echo between Elizabeth’s translation of Seneca’s epistle and her speech to Parliament in 1585. See Mueller and Scodel, Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 409.
The copy found in Merton College’s Register is reprinted in Registrum Annalium Collegii Mertonensis 1567–1603, ed. John M. Fletcher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 289–90.
Studies that examine Elizabeth’s translation of Boethius 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
Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel, ed. Elizabeth I: Translations, 1592–1598 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009)
Howard Rollin Patch, The Tradition of Boethius: A Study of His Importance in Medieval Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935
Caroline Pemberton, “Editor’s Forewords,” to Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings of Boethius, Plutarch and Horace, ed. Caroline Pemberton (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1899)
Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 131–32.
In particular, see J. H. M. Salmon’s chapter “Gallicanism and Anglicanism in the Age of the Counter-Reformation” in his Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 155–88.
See, for example, W. Brown Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 7.
Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), p. 186.
Lake, Anglicansand Puritans?:Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), pp. 159–60.
see W. Brown Patterson, “Elizabethan Theological Polemics,” in A Companion to Richard Hooker, ed. Torrance Kirby, 89–119 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 112–13.
As Elizabeth’s ambassador to Henri, Sir Henry Unton articulates this concern in a letter sent from France when he notes, “The Cardinall of Bourbon, the Chancellor and the three Bishopes that came to Noyon to the Kinge, wherof your Lordship was before advertised, are come to the campe, expreslie to perswade the Kinge to be instructed in their Catholicke faithe, as also to conclude a peace with his subjectes, wherof they seeme to assure the Kinge. Hee putteth them in hope that he wilbe become a Catholicke, as him selfe confesseth to me; and did were two daies together a cloacke of the order of St. Espritt,—wherat the common sorte doe greately rejoice; also he offereth them to conclude a peace with reasonable conditions, which I beleeve to be impossible.” Correspondence of Sir Henry Unton, knt., ambassador from Queen Elizabeth to Henry IV, king of France, in the years 1591 and 1592, ed. Joseph Stevenson (London: W. Nichol, 1847), p. 171.
Bouwsma, “Hooker in the Context of European Cultural History,” in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community, ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade, 41–57 (Tempe, AZ: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1997), p. 48.
Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 56.
Great Britain Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1581–1590, vol. 2 [Searchable text edition], ed. Robert Lemon (Burlington, Ontario: TannerRitchie Publishing in collaboration with the Library and Information Services of the University of St. Andrews, 2005), p. 690.
For more on Alfred’s interpretative “translation” of Boethius, see, for example, F. Anne Payne, King Alfred & Boethius: An Analysis of the Old English Version of the “Consolation of Philosophy” (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968)
Crabbe, “Literary Design in the De Consolatione Philosophiae,” in Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson, 237–74 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 238.
These debates were in addition to numerous secret negotiations with such prominent Catholic figures as Ferdinand I, grand duke of Tuscany—negotiations conducted with particular intensity February-May 1593. For more on these events, see Vincent J. Pitts, Henri IV of France: His Reign and Age (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), p. 169.
Du Vair, Traité de la Constance et Consolation és Calamitez Publiques, ed. Jacques Flach and F. Funck-Brentano (Paris: Léon Tenin, 1915), p. 54.
Great Britain Public Record Office, List and Analysis of State Papers, Foreign Series, Elizabeth I, vol. 5: July 1593-December 1594, ed. Richard Bruce Wernham (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1989), no. 266, p. 255.
The text of Sir Thomas Wilkes’ instructions (dated 14 July 1593) can be found in List and Analysis, vol. 5, no. 436, pp. 358–59. The original letter can be found in the Great Britain Public Record Office, Uncalendared State Papers Foreign of Elizabeth I, 1592–1603 (SP 78). Vol. 31 (Sussex: Harvester, 1982)
Marenbon, Boethius (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 149.
As Edmund Reiss has observed, Boethius’ overall “conception is by and large Neoplatonic, it is also decidedly Christian inasmuch as it identifies God with Love.” See Reiss, Boethius (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), p. 152.
Relihan, The Prisoner’s Philosophy: Life and Death in Boethius’s “Consolation” (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 2.
Greengrass, France in the Age of Henri IV: The Struggle for Stability (London: Longman, 2nd edition, 1995), p. 86.
Astell, Job, Boethius, andEpic Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)
For more on Sandys and Cranmer, see Hugh Trevor-Roper’s chapter, “Richard Hooker and the Church of England,” in his Renaissance Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 110–11.
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© 2010 Linda Shenk
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Shenk, L. (2010). Philosopher-Queen: Elizabeth’s Transcendent Wisdom In The 1590s. In: Learned Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101852_5
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