Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I

In this major contribution to Ideas in Context Anne McLaren explores the consequences for English political culture when, with the accession of Elizabeth I, imperial ‘kingship’ came to be invested in the person of a female ruler. She looks at how Elizabeth managed to be queen, in the face of considerable male opposition, and demonstrates how that opposition was enacted. Dr McLaren argues that during Elizabeth’s reign men were able to accept the rule of a woman partly by inventing a new definition of ‘citizen’, one that made it an exclusively male identity, and she emphasizes the continuities between Elizabeth’s reign and the outbreak of the English civil wars in the seventeenth century. A significant work of cultural history informed by political thought, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I offers a wholesale reinterpretation of the political dynamics of the reign of Queen Elizabeth.

• Offers a wholesale reinterpretation of the political dynamics of Elizabeth I’s reign • Looks at the period through the theme of gender • Highlights continuities between this and later periods in English history, particularly the Civil War

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. ‘To be Deborah’: The political implications of providentialism under a female ruler; 2. Announcing the godly common weal: Knox, Aylmer and the parameters of counsel; 3. Feats of incorporation: the ideological bases of the mixed monarchy; 4. Contesting the social order: ‘resistance theory’ and the mixed monarchy; 5. Godly men and nobles: the bicephalic body politic; 6. Godly men and parliamentarians: the politics of counsel in the 1570s; 7. Rewriting the common weal: Sir Thomas Smith and the De Republica Angelorum; Afterword; Bibliography; Index.

‘… McLaren is to be congratulated for her important achievement. by thoroughly excavating the gendered nature of political discourse in Elizabethan England; she has made a significant contribution to the reevaluation of the political culture and thought of the period.’ Markku Peltonen, University of Helsinki

‘… in dealing with such a wide variety of sources and commentators, McLaren places her work at the intersection of some of the most important themes in sixteenth-century English history.’ Parliamentary History