High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England is a truly interdisciplinary anthology of essays including articles on such actual queen regnants as Mary I and Elizabeth I, and queen consorts such as Anne Boleyn, Anna of Denmark, and Henrietta Maria. The collection also deals with a number of literary representations of earlier historical queens such as Cleopatra, and semi-historical ones such as Gertrude, Tamora, and Lady Macbeth, and such fictional ones as Hermione and the queen of Cymbeline, all of them Shakespeare characters. This fascinating look at Renaissance queens also examines myth and folklore, Romantic or Victorian representations, and the depictions of queens like Catherine de Medici of France in twentieth century film.

Represented in the essays is a vast group of scholars from different fields in order to most completely examine these fascinating women rulers

Introduction; C.Levin, J.Eldridge Carney & D.Barrett-Graves PART ONE: THE NATURE OF RENAISSANCE QUEENS On Education of an Early Modern Queen: Catherine of Aragon, Mary I, and Juan Luis Vives; T.G.Elston Mary I: England's First Renaissance Queen; J.Richards Elizabeth as Sacred Monarch; C.Levin Unmasquing the Connections between Jacobean Politics and Colonization: Anna of Denmark, Pocahontas, Ben Jonson, and the Start of the English Empire, 1614-1616; L.Roper Negotiating Charles I: Henrietta Maria and Elizabeth of Bohemia in the Late 1620s; K.Nelson PART TWO: IMAGING RENAISSANCE QUEENS AND POWER And a Queen of England, Too: The 'Englishing' of Catherine of Aragon in Sixteenth-Century English Literary and Chronicle History; M.Hensen To live eternized in the House of Fame: Renaissance Poets and the Imaging of Queenship; D.Barrett-Graves 'Whore' Queens: The Sexualized Female Body and the State; S.Dunn-Hensley 'We Have Been Soldiers': The Amazon Queen in the Works of Shakespeare and Fletcher; J.Eldridge Carney 'No Head Eminent Above the Rest': Female Authority in Othello and The Tempest; S.Ray 'There's Magic in Thy Magesty': Queenship and Witch-Speak on the Jacobean Stage; K.Stavreva PART THREE: CULTURAL ANXIETIES AND HISTORICAL ECHOES OF RENAISSANCE QUEENS Mary Queen of Scots as Suffering Woman: Representations by Mary Stuart and William Wordsworth; J.Currie Queen Katherine's Dream: Representations of Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn in the Victorian Age; G.Ziegler Anne Boleyn in History, Drama, and Film; R.Warnicke Woman in Black: The Image of Catherine de' Medici from Marlowe to Queen Margot; E.Kruse Afterword; L.Cowen Orlin