Abstract
The first extant English example of the pamphlet debate on gender, the most likely pseudonymous Jane Anger’s Her Protection for Women (1589)—which answers a now-lost misogynist pamphlet— was published during Elizabeth Tudor’s reign. And in Esther hath hanged Haman (1617), one of the defenses of women against Joseph Swetnam’s misogynist attack, The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and uneonstant women (1615), the most certainly pseudonymous Esther Sowernam celebrates Elizabeth as “our late Sovereign, not only the glory of our Sex, but a pattern for the best men to imitate, of whom I will say no more but that while she lived, she was the mirror of the world, so then known to be, and so still remembered, and ever will be.”1
She hath wiped off th’aspersion of her sex, That women wisdom lack to play the rex.
—Anne Bradstreet, “In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory” (1650)
Queen Elizabeth reigned long and happy; and though she cloathed her self in Sheeps skin, yet she had a Lions paw, and a Foxes head; she strokes the Cheeks of her Subjects with Mattery, whilst she picks their Purses; and though she seemed loth, yet she never failed to crush to death those that disturbed her waies.
—Margaret Cavendish, The World’s Olio (1655)
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Notes
Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984)
Diane Purkiss, “Material Girls: The Seventeenth-Century Woman Debate”, in Women, Texts and Histories 1575–1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London: Rout-ledge, 1992), 69
On Agrippa, see Albert Rabil, Jr., “Agrippa and the Feminist Tradition”, the introduction to his edition of Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 1–36.
Hilda L. Smith, “Humanist Education and the Renaissance Concept of Woman”, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–17.
See Carole Pateman, “’The Disorder of Women’: Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice”, in The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1989), 18.
On the “failure of interpellation” brought about by the “disidentification” on the part of the interpellated, see Judith Butler, “Competing Universalities”, in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 158
Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 66–90.
Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 65.
Allison Heisch, “Queen Elizabeth I and the Persistence of Patriarchy”, Feminist Review 4 (February 1980), 45–56.
See Lisa Gim, “’Faire Elizas Chaine’: Two Female Writers’ Literary Links to Queen Elizabeth I”, in Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, eds., Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 183–98
Hilda L. Smith, “Introduction: Women, Intellect, and Politics: Their Intersection in Seventeenth-Century England”, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.
John Watkins, “Old Bess in the Ruff: Remembering Elizabeth I, 1625–1660”, English Literary Renaissance 30.1 (winter 2000), 95–116
Amy Louise Erikson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 111.
D. J. H. Clifford, ed., The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire, UK: Alan Sutton, 1990), 21.
Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Agency of the Split Subject: Lady Anne Clifford and the Uses of Reading”, ELR 22 (1992), 350
C. V. Wedgwood, Oliver Cromwell and the Elizabethan Inheritance (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 5–6.
On the background of Cellier’s treason trial for the “Meal Tub Plot”, see Anne Barbeau Gardiner, “Introduction”, Malice Defeated and The Matchless Rogue, The Augustan Reprint Society, 249–50 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1988), iii–vii.
See Pauline Gregg, Tree-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: Harrap, 1961), 330.
For another recent account of Cellier, see Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)
Rachel Weill, “’If I did say so, I lyed’: Elizabeth Cellier and the Construction of Credibility in the Popish Plot Crisis”, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Tarly Modern Tngland, ed. Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 199–200.
Lois G. Schwoerer, “Women of the Glorious Revolution”, Albion 18.2 (summer 1986), 208
David Hume, The History of England (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983), 4:354.
Patrick Collinson, “The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I”, in Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1994), 43.
Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London: Cardinal, 1974), 63
J. P. Kenyon, Stuart England (1978; sec. ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 19
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© 2002 Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki
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Suzuki, M. (2002). Elizabeth, Gender, and the Political Imaginary of Seventeenth-Century England. In: Malcolmson, C., Suzuki, M. (eds) Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107540_12
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