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The visual images of Queen Elizabeth I displayed in contemporary portraits and perpetuated and developed in more recent media, such as film and television, make her one of the most familiar and popular of all British monarchs. This book is a collection of essays that examine the diversity of the queen's extensive iconographical repertoire, focusing on both visual and textual representations of Elizabeth, in portraiture, literature, contemporary sermons, speeches and alchemical treatises. It falls into three sections. The first part looks at the diverse range of religious and quasi-religious images that were employed by and about Elizabeth, such as the Prophetesse Deborah, the suggestive parallel with Joan of Arc, and finally Lady Alchymia, the female deity in alchemical treatises. When Queen Elizabeth I, the first female Protestant monarch, was enthroned in 1558, male poets, artists, theologians, and statesmen struggled to represent this new phenomenon. The second part turns to one of the major enterprises of the Elizabethan era, the attempt to colonise the New World, during which the eastern seaboard of America was renamed Virginia in celebration of the Virgin Queen. The last part focuses on the ways in which the classical world was plundered for modes of imaging and figuring the queen. Finally, the book summarises the enormously wide range of Elizabeth's iconographical repertoire of its appeal, and provides a fitting end to a book which ranges so widely across the allegorical personae of the queen.
the allegorical personae of the queen. Notes 1. W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1960), pp. 65–66. 2. See for instance James Knowles, ‘“To Enlight the
allegorical personae of expositionary texts such as Piers Plowman thus developed alongside both the ‘commemorative reconstruction’ of biblical tradition in the mystery plays, and the appropriation of tropes of maternity into the discourses of affective piety. 38 Later fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century moral drama extended the figure’s potential range of meanings in plays ‘designed to convey and comment upon a selection of doctrine and
; Trevisan and the Cave of Despair Redcrosse, Una, Arthur; Trevisan (Terwin), 54 Despair This is Trevisan's only appearance; the Despair episode is self-contained X House of Holiness Redcrosse, Una; Allegorical personae of the House, including Caelia and Contemplation The House of Holiness is self-contained, but