Search results
T HE SUBJECTS OF queens and queenship have figured prominently among Janet Nelson’s publications. She has analysed both the women and the contexts within which they acted across a broad chronological range and in different kingdoms. 1 Genre and consequential variations in representation in different types of source have also been a major theme of her work. 2 Also
This volume of essays in honour of Dame Jinty Nelson celebrates the way in which Jinty has used her profound understanding of Frankish history as a frame for reflecting upon the nature of early medieval culture and society in general. It includes a tabula gratulatoria of those very many others who wish to express their appreciation of Jinty's work and their warm personal gratitude to her. She has remained at King's throughout her entire career. Her early career was combined with young motherhood, a tough experience that has made her strongly supportive of colleagues trying to balance work and family. Although she continued to write about early medieval inauguration rituals, a new departure came with the 1977 paper 'On the limits of the Carolingian Renaissance'. The book discusses what factors determined and informed their particular take on the Frankish world, and how this compares to law-codes and charters. It considers the possibility that land was sometimes taken in early medieval Europe, whether by kings or local lords, for what they claimed was the common good. Whenever only meagre information was available, it was impossible to make sense of the past, that is, to take a prosaic approach to a sense of oblivion. The book explores both the roots of the historical interpretation and the stimuli for change, by considering the long historiographical tradition, attitudes to textual sources, and the changing political environment. The subjects of queens and queenship have figured prominently among Nelson's publications.
This book analyses Anna of Denmark’s material and visual patronage at the Stuart courts, examining her engagement with a wide array of expressive media including architecture, garden design, painting, music, dress, and jewellery. Encompassing Anna’s time in Denmark, England, and Scotland, it establishes patterns of interest and influence in her agency, while furthering our knowledge of Baltic-British transfer in the early modern period. Substantial archival work has facilitated a formative re-conceptualisation of James and Anna’s relationship, extended our knowledge of the constituents of consortship in the period, and has uncovered evidence to challenge the view that Anna followed the cultural accomplishments of her son, Prince Henry. This book reclaims Anna of Denmark as the influential and culturally active royal woman that her contemporaries knew. Combining politics, culture, and religion across the courts of Denmark, Scotland, and England, it enriches our understanding of royal women’s roles in early modern patriarchal societies and their impact on the development of cultural modes and fashions. This book will be of interest to upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on early modern Europe in the disciplines of Art and Architectural History, English Literature, Theatre Studies, History, and Gender Studies. It will also attract a wide range of academics working on early modern material and visual culture, and female patronage, while members of the public who enjoy the history of courts and the British royals will also find it distinctively appealing.
the nineteen-year struggle between two queens who both had to cope with the political challenge of identifying themselves as princes rather than women. In the absence of automatic male authority to command, Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I cultivated a specialised poetics of queenship, interweaving emblems, images, verbal and non-verbal languages, as Jennifer Summit has noted. 9 They enacted the same style of
tensions embodied in Cecil’s work, since it suggests that the English Church is threatened by people who are committed to a life of pleasure and are unconcerned with the state of their souls. In the process Cecil’s text writes over the possibility of principled confessional opposition to the Elizabethan religious settlement. A Short Memoryall is an exemplary early Elizabethan political work in its emphasis on counsel, the status of Elizabeth’s queenship and the condition of the realm. It was almost certainly written for a very restricted audience; however, throughout the
Shakespeare’s queens Lady Macbeth is not the only one of Shakespeare’s queens to flicker up in contemporary TV drama, even if their resurgence is less explicit. It is, thus, fruitful to revisit the different configurations of queenship we find in his oeuvre. One key position in such a typology is occupied by an array of warmongering queens whose cry for battle is tied up with family allegiances. In the late tragicomedy Two Noble Kinsmen , three distressed queens interrupt the wedding procession between Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his bride Hippolyta, an Amazon queen
repeatedly come to be depicted in contemporary TV drama to Shakespeare’s recognition that the exercise of power is always slippery, the question becomes, why have these concerns come to work themselves out in their particular shapes in TV dramas that both recall and reconfigure the shapings found in the early modern plays and their conflicted concern with queenship? While the crossmappings proposed in this chapter are predicated on the discovery of analogies between the two, drawing these similarities into focus also foregrounds the transformations that take place as the
anthropological insights they offer interpreters of Orangeism, I want to take the rather unusual step of beginning this concluding chapter not with a summary of my arguments thus far, but by offering something new. What I want to offer, then, is an account of the astonishing and sometimes disorientating claims of British Israelite theology, as connected, in part, to American ideas about manifest destiny, before applying these more directly to Orange ideas about divine queenship, and finally, to Orange ideas about British Protestant exceptionalism. Yet, in an
English crown by leaving no possible avenues for contention open. Thus he moderated Welsh inheritance custom to ensure that his son’s succession would be safe. Joan provides a model of queenship in thirteenth-century Gwynedd. It has been suggested that the role of the queen may have become more expansive and prominent in contemporary Gwynedd and this was reflected in changes in the way that the Iorwerth version of the Welsh lawbooks treated the queen’s household and officers, when that version was redacted. 68 It is just possible that such
position as bridge between the royal court and the regional aristocracy from which she emerged was one of the crucial and enduring bases of a ninth-century queen’s own power. 20 However, when the queen in question came from outside the realm, of necessity this bridging role could not sustain her position in the same way. It is therefore the aim of this article to ask how queenship worked in such unusual circumstances. This aspect of