Female piety in the reign of Elizabeth I.

Reynolds, Paige Martin

In her well-known speech at Tilbury (1588), Queen Elizabeth declared, "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of" a king" (326). Elizabeth's rhetoric here, as elsewhere, both acknowledges and challenges contemporary views of women and of female rule. When she replaces her own "weak and feeble" feminine "body" with "the heart and stomach" of a masculine ruler, Elizabeth affirms the theological principle that woman is, according to I Peter 3:7, the "weaker vessel" and thus less capable of governance than man. By calling on the concept of the "king's two bodies," however, Elizabeth also distances herself from common assumptions associated with female physicality by asserting her special status as divinely ordained. In part, Elizabeth privileges her body politic over her body natural in this way in order to legitimize her political sovereignty, despite her femininity. Yet, by using rhetoric that both reflects and resists contemporary attitudes towards women, Elizabeth simultaneously addresses a set of strictly spiritual concerns.

This essay examines the cultural connection between female physicality and spirituality, specifically as it relates to the reign of Elizabeth I, whose body was the object of constant scrutiny and appraisal. As Maureen Quilligan notes, "The queen's virginity conflicts with the broad sweep of the Protestant redefinition of the family--and therefore of women and of sexuality itself" (177). The reformers' "redefinition of family" included the rendering of female piety as a product of marriage and maternity. That is, a woman's spirituality was considered contingent upon her physicality. The soul that headed England's church resided in a female body that was, famously, unmastered and "unproductive." Elizabeth was, of course, aware of the contradictions she embodied. By briefly exploring some Protestant revisions of female piety and reading some of her own religious writings against them, I will show how Elizabeth I reconciled her reign with the Protestant conflation of female domesticity (marriage and maternity) and female piety.

The case of Phillips Stubbes' wife affirms the popular early modern notion that the status of women's bodies indicated the status of their virtue. In A christal glasse for Christian Women (1592), Stubbes expounds on the goodness of his deceased wife Katharine, offering to other women what he calls a "rare and wonderfull example of the virtuous life" (A2r). According to her husband, among Katharine's many virtues were

her ability to suit her mood to his fancy--"If she saw her husband merry, then she was merry: if he were sad, she was sad: if he were heavy or passionate, she would endevour to make him glad"--and her submissive nature--"she would never contrarie him in anything, but by wise counsaile, and sage advice, with all humilitie, and submission, seeke to perswade him" (A3r). Stubbes goes to great lengths to emphasize his wife's piety as well:

for her whole heart was bent to seeke the Lord, her whole delight was to be conversant in the Scriptures, and to meditate upon them day and night: in so much that you could seldome or never have come into her house, and have found her without a bible, or some other good booke in her hands. (A2v)

Stubbes' portrait of Katharine shows a woman who is, impossibly, wholly devoted to her husband's will and well-being, yet wholly immersed in spiritual activity, such as devotional reading. In his opening description of Katharine, Stubbes proclaims that "whilest shee lived" she "was a myrrour of womanhood," but "now being dead, is a perfect patterne of true Christianitie." (A2r) Death transforms Katharine's spiritual status from the reflective ("myrrour") to the representative ("perfect patterne"). That is, this transformation shifts the deceased woman's role from stereotype to prototype.

While embodied, a woman's spiritual capacity was subordinated to her physical productivity. This notion explains why Katharine's "virtuous life" can be read not merely as a guide for other women, but as an example of spiritual steadfastness and strength--indeed, as the "perfect patterne" of such--once her soul has passed on to heaven. As Shakespeare's Antony says of his dead wife, Fulvia, "she's good, being gone" (1.2.126). Further, by rendering his wife's death as the necessary precondition for the full realization of her spirituality, Stubbes suggests that the female body and the infinite soul are incompatible. Like Dante, whose Beatrice is "conveniently dead," as Philippa Berry notes, Stubbes can portray his beloved as "an immaterial, indeed an angelic figure" precisely because she is no longer embodied (19). Macduff conveys a similar notion when in Macbeth he scolds Malcolm for his supposed wickedness by reminding him of his mother's piety: "the queen that bore thee, / Oft'ner upon her knees than on her feet,/Died every day she lived" (4.3.110-11). Malcolm's mother was, in other words, more prayerful than powerful--"Oft'ner upon her knees than on her feet"--and so pious that she "died" even as she "lived." Although through death a woman might become a "perfect pattern" of spirituality, during her lifetime, she could at best be a "myrrour of womanhood" by marrying and birthing babies.

In using the image of the "myrrour" to describe his wife, Stubbes participates in another facet of the cultural connection between female physicality and spirituality: the traditional association of the mirror with women. As Karen Newman explains, during the early modern period, visual representations of the long-held idea that "the woman at her glass figures mutability and transience of the body" as well as an implicit critique of female narcissism are supplemented by literary representations in which "the metaphor of the glass is a site of ethical exempla" (7). Newman argues that together these "problematics of the mirror" are a means by which men supervise the management of women (8). Stubbes' revision of the mirror metaphor to describe Katharine after her death further spiritualizes his management of his wife's image. By asserting that Katharine could exert influence in the domestic but not the Christian realm during her lifetime, Stubbes affirms Protestant theology concerning male and female spirituality.

Elizabeth's management of her own image likewise resonates with the mirror metaphor. Louis Montrose notes that "the subject of the Queen and the Looking Glass appears in a number of anecdotes" reported during her final years; indeed, he claims that such anecdotes "seem to have multiplied" after Elizabeth's death (241,243). In contrast to Stubbes' use of the mirror as posthumous praise of his wife's spiritual attributes, many stories about Elizabeth and the mirror focus instead on the physical vulnerability and feminine vanity of the aging queen. According to Bishop Godfrey Goodman, for instance, "there was ... a report that the ladies had gotten false looking-glasses, that the queen might not see her own wrinkles" (qtd. in Montrose 243). In England's Mourning Garment (1603), Henry Chettle, on the other hand, interprets the deceased queen's aversion to mirrors as a sign of her authenticity and integrity: "So farre was she from all nicenes ... that she could never abide to gaze in a mirror or looking glass" (qtd. in Montrose 243). Goodman's view simultaneously asserts the queen's vanity and draws attention to her aging body while Chettle's observation emphasizes her modesty and makes no mention of the condition of her body Both comments reveal the same tension the queen's painters had long struggled to negotiate in their work as they sought to represent the image of a monarch whose physical condition both was and was not deemed an adequate representation of her spiritual and political condition. In other words, the queen's status as a Protestant woman demanded an association between her spirit and her body while her status as the unmarried ruler of England revealed the instability of such an association.

A Protestant woman's service to God was both experienced and perceived primarily in terms of her bodily service to her husband and her children, as the case of Katharine Stubbes demonstrates. Indeed, as Rosemary Radford Ruether notes, during the Reformation, marriage came not only to displace the notion of sexual purity as necessary to an elevated spiritual state but became the only venue in which a woman could pursue the Christian calling for which God had created her: to be a wife and mother (116-7). Though she was considered by many exceptional (and thus acceptable), Elizabeth had to combat not only charges of usurpation and tyranny because of her gender but also somehow had to make her unmarried and childless state legitimate in a religious climate that considered female domesticity a woman's only avenue to spiritual transcendence.

The Protestant perspective frames the woman's body as the medium through which she finds salvation: through her chastity before and during marriage, through her birthing of babies, and finally through her death. In this way, the condition of the female soul is both determined and demonstrated by the condition of her body. The cultural assumption that women required male regulation, reinforced by the notion that the embodied female was the "weaker vessel," was, of course, not strictly Protestant. The emphasis of male writers--both Protestant and Catholic--on the importance of female chastity reveals the broader cultural association of female morality with physicality. To measure a woman's chastity--essential in a world that had, as Mark Breitenberg argues, "constructed male honor as contingent upon female chastity"--men looked to those outward virtues which were thought to represent it: modesty, submissiveness, obedience, and silence (175, 189). Many forms of early modern popular and religious discourse--plays, ballads, sermons, conduct books--thus assert the virtue of silence in a woman and, conversely, the vices of scolding and talkativeness. (1)

Shakespeare seems to have had a particular interest in such notions of feminine virtue. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, Hermia wonders how she is able to be so "bold" as "in such a presence here to plead [her] thoughts," and knows not "how it may concern [her] modesty" to do so (1.1.59-60). As Measure for Measure begins, Isabella wishes to be sworn into the sisterhood of Saint Clare, which would entail a vow of silence of sorts: "When you have vowed," explains Francesca, "you must not speak with men/But in the presence of the prioress. Then if you speak, you must not show your face; / Or if you show your face, you must not speak" (1.4.10-11). When Isabella tells Claudio that Angelo will spare his life only in exchange for her virginity, she cannot bring herself to articulate such an act: "this night's the time / That I should do what I abhor to name" (3.1.99-100). Isabella's inability to "name" the sexual act affirms the connection between silence and virtue, not unlike Titus Andronicus' Lavinia, whose refusal to utter that which "'womanhood denies [her] tongue to tell'" suggests that to speak "the word 'rape' is to participate in it," as Christina Luckyj observes (45). Through her lack of response to the Duke's proposal at the end of the play, Isabella is either being silent--a revised version of the vow she purposed to undertake--or being silenced, a provocative reading in terms of her forthrightness and eloquent speech earlier in the play. Marina in Pericles experiences the same end as Isabella; the eloquence with which she "spoke so well" in the brothel that she was able to escape is suddenly dissolved into speechlessness as Pericles gives her to Lysimachus to marry (19.120). Shakespeare addresses this subject most overtly in The Taming of the Shrew, showing through the bridling of Katharine's "scolding tongue" how a woman who "will be free/Even to the uttermost as [she pleases] in words" poses a threat that must be subdued (1.2.96; 4.3.80). The "stark mad" Katharine is contrasted with her fair sister Bianca, whose "silence" Lucentio identifies as sure sign of "maid's mild behaviour and sobriety" (1.1.69, 71). A woman's "tongue" should not "tell the anger of [her] heart" as Kate's does. Conversely, Lear describes Cordelia's "ever soft" voice as "gentle and low," which he says is "an excellent thing in woman" (5.3.247-8).

As these examples suggest, religious beliefs and cultural customs required women to cultivate meekness and, as 'An Homilie of the State of Matrimonie" advises, "patiently beare the sharpnesse of their husbands" in silence (244). In A Bride-Bush (1616), William Whatley encourages women to use "few words, those low and milde, not eagre, not loud" (40). Accordingly, Thomas Salter similarly praises what he sees as an essential characteristic of the ideal woman in his Mirrhor of Modestie (1579): "I would not have her ... to be a babbler or greate talker" (qtd. in Hull 59). Mildness in both the matter and the manner of a woman's speech implied her consent to the social contract that defined women in subordination to men. Further, the physical act of speaking was thought to correspond to other aspects of female physicality. A woman's speech could lead to the judgment of her virtue and seriously jeopardize her reputation, of which Juan Luis Vives says "there is nothing more fragile and vulnerable ... it may well seem to hang by a cobweb" (125). Vives regards the issue as having rather weighty religious ramifications:

I do not wish that a young woman be talkative, not even among her girl companions ... the custom to give praise to a woman for her ability to converse wittily and eloquently with men for hours on end is something that is welcomed and prescribed by the ordinances of hell, in my opinion. (130)

Teaching women to speak "wittily and eloquently with men" is not merely unwise, but evil, according to Vives. He seems to suggest that for "a young woman" to be "talkative" even with her "girl companions" will lead necessarily to transgressive behavior, "prescribed by the ordinances of hell." Vives' suggestion--that talkativeness will result in sexual promiscuity--represents the inverse of a common assumption regarding unchaste women, who were often characterized in terms of their "unfeminine speech," as Laura Gowing notes. Just as modest silence was a sign of chastity, "rude, loud, seductive, mocking, or threatening" talk was an indication of lasciviousness (194). Gall Paster describes "excessive verbal fluency" as linked to the "liquid expressiveness" of female bodies, which were regarded as "leaky vessels" (25). Others could read a woman's true virtue by her modesty.

Elizabeth consistently affirms the association of feminine virtue and silence even as she necessarily sets herself apart from it. The queen begins her "Latin Oration at Cambridge" in 1564, for example, with the following apology:

Although feminine modesty, most faithful subjects and most celebrated university, prohibits the delivery of a rude and uncultivated speech in such a gathering of most learned men, yet the intercession of my nobles and my own goodwill toward the university incite me to produce one. (Elizabeth I 87)

In accordance with contemporary views of women, Elizabeth figures "feminine modesty" as the antithesis of "rude and uncultivated speech." She rhetorically asserts her feminine virtue by claiming to possess such modesty while she reassures her male audience of their authority-she addresses this "gathering of most learned men" precisely because she has been persuaded by other men (her "nobles") to do so.

One year earlier, in her "Answer to the Commons' Petition that She Marry," Elizabeth had similarly prefaced her speech to a different male audience:

The weight and greatness of this matter might cause in me, being a woman wanting both wit and memory, some fear to speak and bashfulness besides, a thing appropriate to my sex. (70)

In another rhetorical gesture toward female modesty--"fear to speak and bashfulness besides"--Elizabeth acknowledges and affirms such characteristics as "appropriate to [her] sex." Moreover, she rehearses common stereotypes of women as "wanting both wit and memory" by asserting a meek view of her own intellectual capacity. Even as Elizabeth seems to adopt such cultural notions, however, she distances herself from them, continuing:

But yet the princely seat and kingly throne wherein God (though unworthy) hath constituted me, make these two causes to seem little in mine eyes ... (70)

As she does in the speech at Tilbury, Elizabeth counteracts negative notions of the feminine body natural by emphasizing the body politic ("the princely seat"), which she has assumed by divine right ("wherein God ... hath constituted me"). Even this indisputable declaration of her authority she tempers with womanly modesty, however: she has been chosen "though unworthy."

The idea that a woman's speech signifies her sexuality is reflective of a larger early modern anxiety about a possible disjunction between outward actions and the inner being, a disjunction that suggests the limitations of embodiment. As Katherine Maus notes, an "apparently universal suspicion of 'appearances'" that results in "chronic doubts about the adequacy of what can be seen" informs both dramatic and nondramatic early modern literature (15). An obvious example is Machiavelli's famous assertion that a prince should "appear all mercy, all faith, all honesty, all humanity, all religion," even if he is none of those things because "everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are" (70-1). This anxiety about the compatibility of outward behavior and spoken words with inner thoughts and beliefs was especially pertinent to considerations and judgments of the female sex. Edmund Tilney calls a woman's "good name" the "flower of estimation, and the pearle of credit, which is so delicate a thing in a woman, that she must not onely be good, but likewise must apeere so" (136). A woman was thus in a perpetually precarious position when it came to appearance--she should "apeere" good, though such an appearance was not necessarily proof of her goodness. On the contrary, appearing good directly called into question whether or not she was good, since appearance was a sign that could easily be deceiving. Appearance was recognized as an unreliable index by which to judge reality, yet it remained an index nonetheless. No early modern woman could have been more aware of the importance of appearance in this regard than the queen, who acknowledged that "the eyes of many behold our actions; a spot is soon spied in our garments; a blemish quickly noted in our doings" (194).

In a culture increasingly aware of the difference between seeming and being, the special emphasis that developed on female integrity is worth noting. The association of a pure mind with the beauty and integrity of the body is an ideal of neoplatonism, professed by writers like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who praised women for their "divine splendor," which outweighed men's because "beauty, is nothing else but the divine light, and splendor shining through faire bodies, he certainly hath chose to dwell in ... Women rather than Men" (6). Agrippa's Catholic background likely has something to do with his veneration of women as "divine," like the Virgin, though certainly neoplatonic notions account for his location of "the divine light" in the "fake bodies" of "Women." Peter Bembo addresses this topic in Book 4 of Castiglione's The Courtier (1528):

I say that beauty cometh of God and is like a circle, the goodness whereof is the center.... And therefore is the outward beauty a true sign of the inward goodness, and in bodies this comeliness is imprinted, as it were, for a mark of the soul.... The foul, therefore, for the most part be also evil, and the beautiful good. (650)

Bembo sees physical beauty as a material manifestation of transcendent goodness and as such, it must be authentic--it is "a true sign" and "a mark of the soul"--a view that invalidates the phobia of false signs, what Hamlet calls "show" or mere "actions that a man might play" (1.2.84-6). Neoplatonic notions such as this did, however, influence one of the culture's most elaborate manifestations of outward show: Petrarchan poetry, the focus of which is often, incidentally, the integrity of its female subjects.

The cultural connection between women's bodies and their virtue might explain why Queen Elizabeth's later iconography portrays her as a young and available virgin though she obviously is not. The Faerie Queene offers an example of the connection between the status of the feminine body and the integrity of the soul in its presentation of the two-faced Duessa. When Duessa is disrobed and shamed at the end of Book I, Canto VIII, her physical appearance is described as nothing less than monstrous: "her misshaped parts did them appall/A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill favoured, old, / Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told." (I.viii.46.7-9) The most hideous and unnatural parts of Duessa's naked body are her sexual organs, the "secret filth" that has in old age replaced those feminine parts so desirable in youth. Her "nether parts" are labeled "the shame of all her kind," and she bears physical marks of her beastly nature in elements such as a "foxes tail, with dong all fowly dight" and "her feet most monstrous" (viii.48.4-5). Upon the knights' bewilderment at seeing "so fowle deformed wight," Una declares: "Such is the face of falsehood" (viii.49.2-4).

Spenser's portrayal of an aging female body as "monstrous" is particularly provocative in light of his audience: the aging Elizabeth I. Affirming the neoplatonic idea that the "beautiful" is "good," Spenser suggests that the best representation of chastity is a youthful, attractive--still marriageable and fertile--body rather than one whose "misshapen parts" are "loathly" and "wrinckled." Susan Frye claims that Elizabeth's "active virtue, so often particularized as her virginity or chastity" protected the queen "from the normal aging process" (100). Frye further asserts that those who created representations of the aging queen often "increasingly claimed Elizabeth's connection with God via her virginity" (111-12). This "face of falsehood"--the image of a youthful, virginal queen covering up an "old," infertile woman--in part served to validate the virtue of Elizabeth's soul by reclaiming the potential productivity of her body.

Even before she came to the throne, Elizabeth's material body had long been a site of spiritual contestation; after all, she was, in the words of Montrose, "the manifest incarnation of the tainted royal union" of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (14). While scholars like Philippa Berry assert that "the tragic life and death of Anne Boleyn overshadowed not only her daughter's childhood but also, by implication, her reign," many have noted Elizabeth's tendency to distance herself from association with her mother, choosing consistently to align herself with her father's figure instead (6). Montrose, for instance, stresses that Elizabeth "made no significant public gestures aimed at the rehabilitation of her mother's deeply ambivalent reputation," reading her neglect as a rejection of her classification as a member of "the community of pious women reformers" in favor instead of "her identification with the masculine body of Protestant kingship." (64) (2) Indeed, the mother of Elizabeth I is persistently positioned as a member of that "community of pious women reformers" in some writings of the period, most famously in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Foxe describes Anne:

... mother to our most noble queen now, who without all controversy was a special comforter and aider of all the professors of Christ's gospel ... her life being also directed according to the same as her weekly alms did manifestly declare, who ... gave also wonderful much privy alms to widows and other poor householders continually till she was apprehended. (9)

He continues reporting Anne's works as a promoter of the Protestant cause as well as her commitment to acts of Christian charity, stating that she thought "no day well spent wherein some man had not fared the better by some benefit at her hands" (10). Foxe also describes Anne's influence on and leadership of other women:

a gentlewoman not now alive but of great credit ... did credibly report that in all her time she never saw better order amongst the ladies and gentlewomen of the Court than was in this good Queen's days, who kept her maids and such as were about her so occupied in sewing and the working of shirts and smocks for the poor that neither was there seen any idleness then amongst them. (9)

The anonymous "gentlewoman" whom Foxe quotes is, like Katharine Stubbes, "not now alive" but authoritative and, as he points out more than once, "credible." It is thus a female (and insider) point of view he uses to praise the good conduct of Anne's "ladies and gentlewomen." Anne was able to maintain such "order" among her "maids" specifically because she kept them immersed in women's work: "sewing and the working of shirts and smocks for the poor." In other words, Anne's positive spiritual influence on the court is strictly feminine, fueled by her own female piety, evidenced in the behavior of women, and affirmed by women "of great credit." Ultimately, Foxe clearly aligns Elizabeth with her mother, not her father, by rendering her rulership as "the evident demonstration of God's favor" on Anne by maintaining, preserving, and advancing the offspring of her body, the Lady Elizabeth, now Queen, whom the Lord hath so marvelously conserved from so manifold dangers ... In whose royal and flourishing regiment we have to behold, not so much the natural disposition of her mother's qualities as the secretjudgment of God in preserving and magnifying the fruit and offspring of that godly Queen. (13-14)

Foxe here focuses on the spiritual importance of the work of a woman's body--Elizabeth is "flourishing" precisely because God chose to "preserve" the "offspring" of Anne's body. In this way, Elizabeth's maternal origin is crucial to her political success. In his Chronickelle of Anne Bulleyne, which he dedicated to Elizabeth, William Latymer similarly aligns the queen with her mother. Echoing Stubbes' use of the mirror metaphor, Latymer offers the piece as "a myrror or glasse" where Elizabeth might see "the moste godly and princely ornaments" of her "moste gracious and naturall mother" in order that she can follow her "example" both religiously and politically (qtd. in Montrose 64).

Anne Boleyn is represented in Foxe's work and elsewhere as "a proto-Protestant martyr and saint," as Donald Stump and Susan Felch note; however, she was by many supposed guilty of the accusations for which she was executed and consistently characterized as a whore and a witch (5). (3) Since, according to prominent medical beliefs at the time, a child born to a woman deemed sinful or dangerous could be contaminated by her, Elizabeth's distancing of her own body from her mother's thus makes good political and spiritual sense--though she was not always successful in doing so. (4) In Popular Errors, the sixteenth-century French physician Laurent Joubert illustrates the idea that, as Sheila Cavanagh points out, "Elizabeth could easily have inherited her mother's lascivious temperament":

It is already enough to be conceived by an evil woman and nourished on her blood for nine months in her belly ... It is good, therefore, to take them away from these evil mothers as soon as they are born and give them to good and kind nurses, healthy in body and mind, in order to blot out with a better sap the bad constitution imprinted in their bodies from the mothers' bad humors, which could cause similar behavior. (qtd. in Cavanagh 195)

To describe the unborn child's vulnerability to the mother, Joubert uses a printing metaphor--a mother's "bad humours" are "imprinted" in the body of her baby--emphasizing maternal influence specifically in matters of materiality. That only the "better sap" of a "good and kind nurse" can "blot out" such imprinting reflects the perceived power of mother's milk on the physical and moral development of a child. Similarly, in A Godly Form of Householde Governement: For the Ordering of Private Families, Robert Cleaver writes:

The wife is further to remember that God hath given her two breasts, not that she should employ and use them for a show or of ostentation but in the service of God, and to be a help to her husband in suckling the child common to them both. Experience teacheth that God converteth her blood into the milk wherewith the child is nursed in the mother's womb. (qtd. in Hull 120)

In this passage, Cleaver spiritualizes the feminine anatomy, explaining that the wife's "breasts" are to be used "in the service of God" rather than for "show." The writer makes manifest the notion that female spirituality was contingent on physicality while emphasizing the woman's role as both wife and mother; in "suckling the child" she is "a help to her husband." Cleaver concludes that the mother's milk is converted from her blood; that is, the child literally feeds on her blood ("bad humours" and all, as Joubert might add). Thus in The Winter's Tale, as Leontes removes Mamillius from the presence of his mother, Hermione, he exclaims: "I am glad you did not nurse him./Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you/Have too much blood in him" (2.1.59-61).

Such sentiments regarding the potentially contaminating influence of maternal blood resonate with Catholic objections to Elizabeth's rulership. As Carole Levin points out, for instance, Cardinal William Mien writes that Elizabeth was "an incestuous bastard, begotten and born in sin" and goes on to accuse her of various acts of "filthy lust," claiming that she remained unmarried "because she cannot confine herself to one man" (qtd. in Heart and Stomach 80-1). Mien asserts that the dubious conditions of Elizabeth's birth--punctuated most emphatically by the execution of her mother--directly resulted in the queen's own provocative behaviors. Anne Boleyn, in other words, had "too much blood" in her daughter.

In many of her own writings and speeches, Elizabeth acknowledges the tension between the Protestant ideal of female piety and the reality of her reign. Through her spiritual posturing in some of her prayers, for example, Elizabeth identifies herself both as a woman and as the recipient of God's special favor--that is, though her body is female, her soul is exceptional, much like the Virgin Mary. In this way, Elizabeth is not a "myrrour of womanhood," but rather a conduit of divine authority. She is the "patterne" of godly perfection rather than the reflection of limited female piety; unlike Katharine Stubbes or her own mother, Elizabeth does not have to be dead in order to achieve this status.

In a prayer of "Thanksgiving" from 1569, the queen validates her sovereignty through expressions of gratitude such as: "Thou hast given me so many special graces that it is impossible for me to rehearse them or even be able to comprehend them." Though she does not list all of the "special graces" given to her by God, she does specify His elevation of her to the throne: "Thou hast raised me and chosen me by Thy wonderful providence to confer on me under the majesty of Thy greatness a state of honor and excellence, to wit, royal dignity for the government and preservation of Thy people" (Elizabeth I 145). By invoking Psalm 116, Elizabeth's prayer clearly aligns her with David, a figure similarly "raised" and "chosen" by God: "what shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards me?" Associating herself with David is a tactic Elizabeth uses repeatedly. In this case, the queen offers a gendered adaptation of the psalmist's words:

But O Lord, give me grace as formerly Thou didst to David, a man according to Thy heart, who treating this same subject and reciting the testimonies of Thy goodness, said: "Thus it is Lord, I am Thy manservant, I am Thy manservant, the son of Thy chambermaid. Thou hast broken my bonds. I will offer unto thee an offering of thanksgiving and entreat the name of the Lord." Thus I say, Lord, of myself, and say it by Thy grace: I am Thy maidservant, I am Thy maidservant. Thou hast broken my bonds. (146)

David's "I am Thy manservant, I am Thy manservant, the son of Thy chambermaid" becomes in Elizabeth's rewriting "I am Thy maidservant, I am Thy maidservant," omitting the reference to parentage. Instead, the queen maintains her position as the sole central figure. By calling herself God's "maidservant," an identifier she uses elsewhere, Elizabeth simultaneously alludes to the virgin Mary (also known as God's "maidservant") and figures herself as a female David. By calling on images of both Mary and David, Elizabeth asserts her status as an exceptional woman; her feminine body allows her to be the vessel and bearer of God's grace, while her soul's special status allows her to be the chosen and protected leader of his people. By both standards, Elizabeth is exempt from the culturally and religiously prescribed view of the female body's relationship to its soul and salvation.

Elizabeth's exemption did not register, to her or to her subjects, as an example to other women. Indeed Elizabeth herself reinforces contemporary beliefs about the weakness of women. In a prayer of thanksgiving for the Armada victory, for example, the queen says of herself that "the weakest sex hath been so fortified by Thy strongest help that neither my people might find lack by my weakness nor foreigners triumph at my ruin" (424). Similarly, in an earlier prayer written in 1569, Elizabeth says: "Thou hast done me so special and so rare a mercy that, being a woman by my nature weak, timid, and delicate, as are all women, Thou hast caused me to be vigorous, brave, and strong" (157). In some ways, Elizabeth's insistence on the weak nature of women validated her own position as divinely ordained--after all, as a woman, she would not have the spiritual, mental, or physical capacity to rule without God's special favor. This seems to be the case in this particular prayer, especially since a few lines later Elizabeth invokes a female set of models for her fight against the "enemies" of the faith: "persist ... in giving me the strength so that I, like another Deborah, like another Judith, like another Esther, may free Thy people of Israel from the hands of Thy enemies" (157). Elizabeth's alliance with these figures was common throughout her reign; they were "portrayed as representations of Elizabeth in pageantry" as well as "woodcuts and other visual representations," as Susan Doran points out (38). The women to whom Elizabeth refers provide a biblical precedent for female leadership, but of special significance in this prayer is the capacity in which these women lead--each has been chosen at a specific time in the history of God's people in order to liberate them from oppression. Elizabeth is here staking her claim for sovereignty on the notion that she, like the other women she mentions, is exceptional partially because of exceptional historical conditions. Her deviation from the common understanding of Protestant female piety is thus acceptable; after all, she is liberating God's people from his popish "enemies."

In "a song made by her majesty and sung before her" in celebration of the Armada victory in 1588, Elizabeth I petitions God:

   Look and bow down Thine ear, O Lord.
   From Thy bright sphere behold and see
   Thy handmaid and Thy handiwork,
   Amongst Thy priests, offering to Thee
   Zeal for incense, reaching the skies;
   Myself, and scepter, sacrifice. (410-11)

Like so many of Elizabeth's religions writings, the song recalls a psalm. The song begins as a prayer, echoing the first line of Psalm 86: "Incline thine eare, o Lord, and heare me." The phrase that follows immediately in the psalm--"for I am poor and nedie"--makes clear that Elizabeth's celebratory song is not only a recollection, but also a revision of the psalm. The scripture is a plea for deliverance--"Be merciful vnto me, o Lord: for I crye vpon thee continually" (Psalms 86.3)--while the song is a proclamation of victory. When Elizabeth asks God to "behold and see" her, His "handmaid," she seeks approval, not deliverance.

Although God is made the audience throughout the psalm, Elizabeth begins with an address to God, then moves toward an exhortation to her own soul to praise Him. That is, though God remains the subject of praise, He does not retain the position of centrality in the song--the queen does. Her sacrifice to God is figured as both "self" and "scepter"--that is, her body natural and her body politic--while her "soul" remains a separate entity: "My soul, ascend His holy place./Ascribe Him strength and sing Him praise" (411). Elizabeth gives both her feminine body and her masculine crown as "sacrifice" in gratitude to God; her "soul," however, achieves new spiritual heights as it "ascends" to "His holy place." In this way, Elizabeth asserts an understanding of her own soul as genderless, even when embodied.

Elizabeth I was more exceptional than exemplary in matters of female piety. Rather than representing a "myrrour of womanhood," the queen's special status defied imitation. Unlike Katherine Stubbes, whose death was a prerequisite for the realization of her full spiritual capacity, Elizabeth repeatedly insists that her spirituality is not contingent on her physicality. Ultimately, Elizabeth pushes against Protestant theology with the idea that the female body and the immaterial soul are not incompatible after all--at least not when they belong to the queen.

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Notes

(1.) For an overview of contemporary discussions of female silence, see Luckyj and Hull.

(2.) See editors' note, Elizabeth 1 410.

(3.) See also Carole Levin, "We shall never have a merry world" 78.

(4.) For further discussion of her subjects' perceptions of the queen's sexual behavior, see Carole Levin, Heart and Stomach 66-90.