Abstract
Book dedications are often the first words in any early modern printed book after the title, but they have generally been skipped over in favor of studying the body of the text. However, dedications provide an enormous amount of information regarding patronage, women’s power, and print culture. The study of book dedications, both in manuscript and in print, to royal Tudor women is no exception. Lady Margaret Beaufort, Elizabeth of York, the six queens consort of Henry VIII, Queen Mary I, and Elizabeth I received more than 250 dedications in a period of just over 100 years. While this is interesting in itself, when considered in light of the novelty of print in England and the assumed inferiority of queens to kings, the dedications can be used to extract social and political meaning.
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Notes
Williams, Jr. Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before 1641 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1962).
see Kevin Dunn, Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
Baranda Leturio, “Women’s Reading Habits: Book Dedications to Female Patrons in Early Modern Spain,” in Women’s Literacy in Early Modern Spain and the New World, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Rosilie Hernández (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 19–39.
John Buchtel, “Book Dedications in Early Modern England: Francis Bacon, George Chapman, and the Literary Patronage of Henry, Prince of Wales” (PhD diss., University of Virgina, 2004);
John Buchtel, “‘To the Most High and Excellent Prince’: Dedicating Books to Henry, Prince of Wales,” in Prince Henry Revived: Image and Exemplarity in Early Modern England, ed. Timothy V. Wilks (London: Holberton, 2008), 104–133;
John Buchtel, “Book Dedications and the Death of a Patron: The Memorial Engraving in Chapman’s Homer,” Book History 7 (2004), 1–29.
Tara Wood, “‘To the most godlye, virtuos, and myghtye Princess Elizabeth’: Identity and gender in the dedications to Elizabeth I” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2008).
S.J. William Wizeman, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
Helen Smith, “Grossly Material Things”: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
See J. W. Martin, “The Marian Regime’s Failure to Understand the Importance of Printing,” Huntington Library Quarterly 44 (Autumn 1981), 231–247;
Jennifer Loach, “The Marian Establishment and the Printing Press,” The English Historical Review 101 (January 1986), 135–148;
D. M. Loades, “The Press under the Early Tudors: A Study in Censorship and Sedition,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographic Society 4 (1964), 29–50.
See John N. King, “The Account of a Marian Bookseller, 1553–4,” British Library Journal 13 (Spring 1987), 33–57;
See John N. King, “The Book Trade under Edward VI and Mary I,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume III, 1400–1557, ed. Lotte Hellinga and J. B. Trapp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 164–178;
See John N. King, Tudor Books and Readers: Materiality and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
See Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
Eamon Duffy and David Loades, eds., The Church of Mary Tudor (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
David Loades, “The Personal Religion of Mary,” in The Church of Mary Tudor, ed. Eamon Duffy and David Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 19–20.
Maria Dowling, ed., “William Latymer’s Chronickille of Anne Bulleyne,” Camden Miscellany, vol. 30 (London, 1990), Introduction, 35.
Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Rich mond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 49.
John Fisher, The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, ed. John E. B. Mayor (London: Early English Text Society, 1876), 291.
see David Starkey, Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003)
and John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
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© 2015 Valerie Schutte
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Schutte, V. (2015). Introduction. In: Mary I and the Art of Book Dedications. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137541284_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137541284_1
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