Search results for ""Author Clark Hulse""

Making history from the moment of her birth, England's Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) was a legend within her own lifetime. To her supporters, Elizabeth I was Gloriana, the Faerie Queene, a dignified and powerful woman who ruled with cunning and skill for forty-four years. To her detractors she was the ruthless supporter of a false religion; the murderer of her cousin Mary Queen of Scots; a wanton woman, herself illegitimate, who sullied the crown with her licentious behavior. The legends that have grown up around Elizabeth are fascinating, but as this book shows, the truth is just as remarkable. In Elizabeth I: Ruler and Legend, Clark Hulse brings Elizabeth to life, combining text and images to tell her story through the objects handed down by history. Commemorating the four hundredth anniversary of Elizabeth's death, this handsome volume contains over one hundred photographs of books, manuscripts, maps, letters, paintings, clothing, furniture, and many more artifacts dating from her reign. Each of these objects tells a story, and Hulse uses them as a starting point for a broad and thorough examination of Elizabeth and the society in which she lived. Beginning with an analysis of the political events surrounding her birth, the book describes Elizabeth's relationship with her father, Henry VIII, and the maneuvering that led to her eventual coronation upon the death of her half-sister Mary Tudor in 1558. As queen, Elizabeth oversaw a period of breathtaking cultural achievement. She kept England from being torn apart by the religious wars raging across Europe, and she withstood both an assassination plot and the massive military threat of the Spanish Armada. This book addresses all these major events, as well as a whole host of lesser-known aspects of Elizabeth's reign. Hulse includes discussions of topics such as the education of Tudor women; markers of identity; portraits of Elizabeth; the queen's speaking style; her interest in America; music at the Tudor court; and literary depictions of Elizabeth by Shakespeare, Spenser, and other poets.

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An interdisciplinary group of scholars applies the reinterpretive concept of "visual culture" to the English Renaissance. Bringing attention to the visual issues that have appeared persistently, though often marginally, in the newer criticisms of the last decade, the authors write in a diversity of voices on a range of subjects. Common among them, however, is a concern with the visual technologies that underlie the representation of the body, of race, of nation, and of empire. Several essays focus on the construction and representation of the human body—including an examination of anatomy as procedure and visual concept, and a look at early cartographic practice to reveal the correspondences between maps and the female body. In one essay, early Tudor portraits are studied to develop theoretical analogies and historical links between verbal and visual portrayal. In another, connections in Tudor-Stuart drama are drawn between the female body and the textiles made by women. A second group of essays considers issues of colonization, empire, and race. They approach a variety of visual materials, including sixteenth-century representations of the New World that helped formulate a consciousness of subjugation; the Drake Jewel and the myth of the Black Emperor as indices of Elizabethan colonial ideology; and depictions of the Queen of Sheba among other black women "present" in early modern painting. One chapter considers the politics of collecting. The aesthetic and imperial agendas of a Van Dyck portrait are uncovered in another essay, while elsewhere, that same portrait is linked to issues of whiteness and blackness as they are concentrated within the ceremonies and trappings of the Order of the Garter. All of the essays in Early Modern Visual Culture explore the social context in which paintings, statues, textiles, maps, and other artifacts are produced and consumed. They also explore how those artifacts—and the acts of creating, collecting, and admiring them—are themselves mechanisms for fashioning the body and identity, situating the self within a social order, defining the otherness of race, ethnicity, and gender, and establishing relationships of power over others based on exploration, surveillance, and insight.

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