The Queen Elizabeth I Society: the first ten years.

Levin, Carole

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In 2001 Donald Stump asked me if I would like to help him create an organization for people studying Queen Elizabeth I. So much thoughtful and innovate scholarship had been done about Elizabeth I in the last decades of the twentieth century by people in a variety of disciplines that it seemed like the perfect time for a society to be formed. We wanted an organization that would be welcoming to graduate students as well as to senior scholars, and to scholars from a wide range of disciplines: literature, history, art history, music history, and the like. Thus was the Queen Elizabeth I Society born, with our first sessions at South Central Renaissance Conference in 2002 in St. Louis. In 2011 we celebrated our tenth anniversary of this founding, returning to St. Louis once again, with Donald and St. Louis University as our host. In the intervening years our organization has grown. We have a website. We sponsor many sessions, have our keynote speakers, offer the Agnes Strickland prize for best essays in the open sessions, awarding work by both graduate students and senior scholars. As well as our commitment to excellent scholarship, we are also dedicated to the joy we take in our work. At our conference every year we have an evening entertainment and an auction of" what we claim comes from the queen's attic.

This decade has seen an explosion of brilliant scholarship on Elizabeth I. Many members of our society have been a part of it. In 2009 Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch published the Norton critical edition on Elizabeth, Elizabeth I and Her Age, which in 2010 received the award for best book to be used for teaching by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. Scholarship produced for conference presentations has led to members working together on further scholarly projects. A session on Elizabeth I and Foreign Powers was held at the conference in 2008, with papers by Brandie Siegfried, Anna Riehl Bertolet, Nathan Martin, and Nate Probasco. Charles Beem used the four papers as a core set of essays for a collection The Foreign Relations of Elizabeth I (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

We did a special issue of Explorations in Renaissance Culture in 2004 based on our 2003 meeting, which celebrated the four hundred anniversary of the death of Elizabeth. To celebrate the achievements of our organization, we are doing this second special issue. We have gathered together a number of our keynote presentations and Strickland winners of the last few years at the Queen Elizabeth I Society. The essays by Debra Barrett-Graves, Charles Beem, Catherine Loomis, Marguerite Tassi, and Jacqueline Vanhoutte were all presented as keynotes, while the essays by Daniel Ellis, Nate Probasco, and Mary Villeponteaux all had received the Agnes Strickland award for best paper in the open sessions. We have also included the essay of Paige Reynolds, one of our members. These essays show how thoughtful and wide-ranging the scholarship on Elizabeth and queenship has become.

This collection of essays adds to the scholarly discussion on queens in the Renaissance with work on history, literature, and art. While some of the essays address such canonical texts as The Merchant of Venice, others bring attention to little-known works such as those by George Ferrers. A number of them also address Elizabeth I's own writing. These essays have many connections between them showing the richness of the scholarship on queens.

Debra Barrett-Graves explores the significance of the images in the Hampden Portrait of Elizabeth I. Through her use of emblem books, such as Palmer's Poosees, she is able to find the meanings that Elizabethans would have understood but are much less well known today. Daniel Ellis argues that while Elizabeth could be clear and direct, since the time she was a child, she had learned the values of deferral and indeterminacy, and they became a central aspect of her rhetoric. Ellis examines the eleven-year-old Elizabeth's translation, and the context of her life when she did it, of Marguerite de Navarre's religious writings. The Glass of the Sinful Soul was a gift for Catherine Parr. By also examining her later speeches and writings, Ellis determines that the style the child used became a significant feature of her political rhetoric once she became queen. Jacqueline Vanhoutte uses John Lyly's Endymion as a way into an analysis of late Elizabethan treatises that attacked the sexuality of aging men. As the queen aged, so did a number of the men of her court, such as Robert Dudley and Christopher Hatton. But while there were perceptions of older men being indecorous in love, Vanhoutte deftly shows that there was a complexity of contemporary reactions to the queen's age, and by examining Elizabeth's own words demonstrates that the queen herself was quite open about her age.

Mary Villeponteaux makes a number of intriguing connections between Portia in A Merchant of Venice and Elizabeth in her essay, "A Goodly Musicke in Her Regiment: Elizabeth, Portia, and the Elusive Harmony of Justice." As Villeponteaux points out, Elizabeth's counselors were often upset that Elizabeth wanted to be merciful when they thought it would be more expedient to be punitive. She presents a careful analysis of the conflict between cultural expectations of female mercy and the need for the monarch to provide justice. Villeponteaux argues that in Portia Shakespeare reconciles some of the tensions between justice and mercy and draws fascinating parallels between Shakespeare's character and Shakespeare's queen.

While Villeponteaux looks at conflict and confluence of mercy and justice, Marguerite Tassi looks at conflicts between sympathy for loss and distaste for the sharp desire for female revenge. Tassi shows the resonance of the story of Hecuba in the early modern period. She demonstrates that Shakespeare engaged sympathy for the usually not sympathetic female characteristic of sharply desired revenge by using the myth of Hecuba as a mourning mother-queen and woman of agency, to make such characters as Tamora in Titus Andronicus and Queen Margaret in the Henry VI tetralogy more understandable. Tassi also adroitly shows the connections of Elizabeth to these fictional queens. She carefully argues that early modern feminine revenge gains an ethical justification when female characters echo Hecuba as powerless mother-queens who witness wartime atrocities.

In "Female Piety in the Reign of Elizabeth I" Paige Reynolds examines the cultural connections between the physicality of women and their spirituality, particularly when a woman, Elizabeth I, is on the throne. By looking at Elizabeth I's own statements, representations of women in such authors as Shakespeare, and actual women such as Katherine Stubbes, Reynolds argues that the queen pushed against Protestant theology by presenting the concept that the female body and the immaterial soul are not incompatible. And while Elizabeth I may have been speaking specifically about herself, it resonated culturally beyond her Majesty.

While Tassi and Reynolds are examining Elizabeth and women, some of the essays examine men who were at Elizabeth's court and the queen's connection with them. Nate Probasco, in "Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Elizabeth I, and the Anglo-Spanish Conflict," tells the intriguing story of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's plan for extending the queen's and England's influence in the Americas. The often-cautious Elizabeth signed patents that demonstrated her support of Gilbert's daring plans. Though Gilbert himself died before his plans could be implemented, Probasco argues that his ideas had great influence on subsequent explorers and adventurers such as Sir Francis Drake, Sir Richard Grenville, and Sir Martin Frobisher.

Catherine Loomis examines how Elizabeth and others at court regarded Robert Cecil, the brilliant advisor who was very short with a hunchback, wry neck, disproportionately large head, and splayed feet. While Elizabeth nicknamed him her "pygmy," and later her "elf," many others had even more cruel names for Cecil. Loomis also examines how the Cecil family explained Robert's disability so that it did not reflect on his mother Mildred, claiming that his nurse had dropped him as a baby rather than, as it truly was, genetic. Mothers were blamed for any abnormalities because people believed they were caused by something the mother did while pregnant.

Charles Beem examines the Tudor gentleman George Ferrets, a man of many talents who was occasionally in the spotlight during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. One of his talents was on display when he authored the Lady of the Lake's address at the entertainment at Kenilworth that Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, arranged for Queen Elizabeth. He was one of the authors of The Mirror for Magistrates. He also provided the first English translation of the Magna Carta. Beem examines Ferrer's career from a variety of angles and argues that Ferrers was a scholar and a man who was able to survive in a variety of environments. Beem argues that Ferrers apparently craved the glitz and glitter of the courtier's life without any discernible desire for an office in royal government.

These essays show the great vitality of scholarship on Elizabeth I and the high quality of work produced by members of the Queen Elizabeth I Society. We have had a great first ten years. We look forward to many more. I am deeply grateful to Thomas Herron and Frances Malpezzi for the opportunity to edit this special issue, to Ilona Bell for thoughtful and generous readings of the essays, to my undergraduate research assistant Alicia Meyer for all her help putting this issue together, and to the South Central Renaissance Conference for their generosity in hosting us each year.