This book encounters the figure of the royal woman in the early modern period and explores how she enables and complicates the key moment at which England was emerging as an ideology, a nation, and an empire. Queens and queens consort, historical and fictional, played crucial roles in Renaissance England’s shifting ideologies of nationalist identity. This collection considers how a series of royal women particularly embodied and complicated these many self-constructions of England and complex renditions of “the other.”

The period’s influential female monarchs certainly made the queen’s political body more visibly politicized, repatriated, and racialized; these same historical royals were represented as icons of nationalism in many forms and functions. In fictional incarnations, royal women created by the English imagination symbolized and structured those same nation-building narratives. This volume studies royal women’s writings alongside such depictions of royal women, especially as such works collectively enable emergent English ideologies of nationalism and racialization.

Elizabeth Hodgson is a Professor in the Department of English Language & Literatures at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She specializes in early modern poetry and prose, gender politics and spiritual cultures.

Sarah Crover is a Professor in the Department of English at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, Canada. She works on the eco-cultural history of the Thames, London theatre, Tudor queens and civic identity.