Why did Elizabeth I never leave England, and what diplomatic issues did this fact of her monarchy create? The nimble essays collected in this volume ponder the condition of a thoroughly domesticated monarch in foreign contexts and are divided into three parts, each addressing one area of the diplomatic arena. The first part examines the queen at home as seen through foreign eyes; the second part remains close to home, focusing on Europe; the third part investigates the English Queen from a non-Western and Muslim perspective. With the exception of Nabil Matar's contribution, these essays were presented at the 2008 Queen Elizabeth I Society conference in Missouri. The preface declares this an “idiosyncratic” collection; yet this is misleading because the editor, through careful scaffolding and thoughtful organization, has crafted an arrangement that covers much ground to significant effect. This book does not purport to be a definitive work on Elizabethan foreign policy—a category, the editor notes, Elizabethans themselves would not have recognized. Instead, it achieves two important ends. First, its essays provide interesting material usually absent from interpretations and perceptions of the queen. Second, it fills a gap in the historiography by bringing the Muslim world into discourse about Elizabethan foreign relations. This book contributes to trends in scholarship that seek to examine Elizabethan worlds of politics, trade, and culture in an expansive framework of understanding. Quite apart from the goals of any of the authors here, a work such as this is a further reminder that development of non-Western, non-European language abilities should be encouraged in early modern British history graduate programs.
Carole Levin and Charles Beem, editors of the Palgrave Macmillan Queenship and Power series, begin part 1 with an essay explaining why Elizabeth I remained in England. The short answer is that the queen had no reason to leave and every political reason to remain within the borders of her own country. This set piece establishes the contexts of a self-identified English queen of England, who never traveled to the frontiers of her own kingdom, making the essays that follow all the more intriguing. The task for Elizabeth's government was to make concrete a monarch who was largely an abstraction both to people subsumed under the English crown by colonial conquest, as in Ireland, and to remote foreign courts. Using a variety of approaches, this book scrutinizes programs of that representation.
B. R. Siegfried's essay in part 1, “The Song of Elizabeth,” bears the title of an English ballad, rewritten in 1560 to suit Ireland, and looks at the reception there of Elizabeth. Using the ballad as a departure point, her close reading of it uncovers aspects of the craft of the queen's image making through material culture, specifically “proclamations, clocks, and coins” (50). Siegfried is especially concerned, in this treatment of Ireland and England, to investigate how English dominance was asserted through manipulation of the queen's image in features of daily life. For example, people encountered coinage with the queen's image or were reminded of time by the three city clocks installed shortly after Elizabeth's accession, making the English monarch a pervasive presence in Irish lives. Calling clocks and coins “technologies of practical administration,” Siegfried convincingly argues for the conquest of Ireland by England as one of symbolic as well as military power and effort (65).
Essays in part 2 examine the construction of projections of Elizabeth in spheres of continental Europe, including France and Russia. Anna Riehl Bertolet analyzes diplomatic exchanges, lasting twenty-odd years, between Tsar Ivan IV and Elizabeth, which were intended to further trade and forge political alliance between the two countries. Bertolet shows that those intentions were thwarted, or at least limited, by linguistic restraints. Lacking a language common to them both, the rhetoric employed in their correspondence reveals profound and fundamental conceptual differences in how they interpreted each other's political position. The resultant and recurrent misunderstandings had diplomatic and commercial repercussions.
In chapter 6, Claire Jowitt explores linkages among monarchy, piracy, and gender in Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the West. This essay seems at first sight a little out of place in a volume about Elizabeth I in foreign perception. Jowitt makes a compelling argument for regarding the political implications of “links between a female character and successful piracy” in Heywood's Fair Maid of the West (126) as a successful component of early modern empire building and networks of trade, piracy, and gender is a suggestive arena.
Part 3 is most exciting because its coverage of Elizabeth's relations with the Muslim world responds to a lacuna in late Tudor scholarship. Nabil Matar's “Elizabeth Through Moroccan Eyes,” a revised version of another publication, scrutinizes correspondence between the queen and Moroccan potentate Mulay Ahmad al-Mansur. Their exchanges, Matar declares, provide the only non-Western view of a European ruler from the sixteenth century. From these an interpretation of Elizabeth emerges that contrasts with Anglo and European perceptions of the queen. From the perspective of al-Mansur, the “imperial virgin was not imperial at all” (146). Yet what transpired through correspondences between the two rulers reveals “the first deep friendship between a Muslim and a Christian monarch in the early modern period” (146).
The authors of the last two essays examine diplomatic and cultural crosscurrents between Elizabeth and Gunpowder Empires in Persia and India, respectively. Together, these show the limits of Elizabethan ambitions of empire and differences in conceptualizations of rulership, and present a context for the irrelevance of religious differences.
Scholars and graduate students interested in the emergent global presence of England at the close of Elizabeth's reign would benefit from this volume. The essays would also be useful for assignment to upper division undergraduates to stimulate engagement with notions of early modern gender and of emergent economies and commerce, as well as political economy. This volume includes a select bibliography.
