The Cult of Elizabeth & Its Textuality

“The Cult of Elizabeth” is a historical and cultural phenomenon that, admittedly, has been extensively explored so far. This book, however, concentrates on the literary representations of the Virgin Queen and stays astray of the popular textual representation of the last Tudor monarch. In the core of this analysis stand works by Richard Mulcaster, Sir Walter Ralegh, Thomas Morly and Robert Chester. The book traces the chronological development of the textual image of Elizabeth from the first days on the throne to the last years of the Queen and succeeds in revealing a compelling progress in the development of linguistic, ornamental, symbolic and inter-textual links. The straightforward and conspicuous propaganda in the first literary works dedicated to the sanctification of Elizabeth turn into an idiom of representing the British reality of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in a complex, sometimes obscure but always intriguing and challenging way. The analysis completes the view on Elizabeth’s masterful use of art in the establishment of a stable political apparatus in a period in which the status of the woman ruler was highly problematic by adding non-canonical Renaissance texts to the corpus of portraits, jewelries and state ceremonies that have been the core of the investigation of the ‘Cult of Elizabeth’ over the past five decades.