Abstract
In 1569, Elizabeth I assumed the role of a pious, learned queen in her most sustained demonstration of erudite piety printed during her reign. She is presented as the author of seventeen foreign language prayers that conclude Christian Prayers and Meditations in English[,] French, Italian, Spanish, Greeke, and Latine—a lengthy prayer book published by the famous Protestant printer and propagandist John Day1 The prayers alone are remarkable; composed in the key European languages (French, Spanish, Italian), the biblical language of Greek, and the international lingua franca, Latin, they present Elizabeth as a multilingual, Christian queen who speaks to the international community. What is equally remarkable is how Day’s prayer book as a whole imbues Elizabeth with a powerful, yet quiet, ecclesiastical presence guiding her National Church. Highly clever and richly layered, the image of Elizabeth in Christian Prayers demonstrates how ecclesiastical, monarchical, and international politics coalesce in Elizabeth’s learned persona.
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Notes
Editors Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose have noted that these prayers contain many of Elizabeth’s idiosyncrasies of composition—information that supports the pos-sibility that Elizabeth did write these prayers. Elizabeth I: Collected Works (henceforth CW), ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 2000), pp. 143–44
Jennifer Clement is the only other scholar to have published an essay-length study of these prayers, and she, too, approaches them primarily as an image of the queen. Clement, “The Queen’s Voice: Elizabeth I’s Christian Prayers and Meditations,” Early Modern Literary Studies 13.3 (January 2008 ): I.I–26. http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/i3-3/clemquee.htm
Steven W. May considers Elizabeth’s prayers overall as private texts that Elizabeth did not want circulated. His description of her prayers in the 1590s sheds important light on these later demonstrations. In the 1560s, however, the crown authorized the publication of Christian Prayers as well as an earlier royal prayer book Precationes priuatae—authorized texts that suggest to me that the crown wanted (at least) these prayers disseminated. See May, “Queen Elizabeth Prays for the Living and the Dead,” in Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing, ed. Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo, 201–11 (London: British Library, 2007).
Elizabeth I: Autograph Compositions and Foreign Language Originals (henceforth ACFLO), ed. Janel Mueller and Leah S. Marcus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
I describe their claims as “persuasive” because Mary’s image as passion-blind and incapable of rule had as much to do with propaganda as with actual history. For more on the manipulation of Mary’s image, see Retha M. Warnicke, Mary Queen of Scots (London: Routledge, 2006).
Cecil (and Bernard Hampton), A Necessary Consideration of the Perilous State of this Tyme, Public Record Office, State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth 1, 12/51, fol. 16v. I quote from the fair copy produced by Cecil’s secretary, Bernard Hampton. For an insightful discussion of this text, see Stephen Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis, 1558–1569 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
For the known connection between Day and Cecil, see Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, “John Foxe, John Day and the Printing of the ‘Book of Martyrs,’” in Lives in Print: Biography and the Book Trade from the Middle Ages to the 21st Century, ed. Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, 23–54 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2002).
Christian Prayers was only one of many instances in which Elizabeth was depicted as a Solomon. In the 1560s alone, she likened herself to this king in her prayer book Precationes priuatae; she was praised as Solomon in the play Sapientia Solomonis during Princess Cecilia of Sweden’s visit in 1566; and in his A chronicle at large (1569), Richard Grafton depicted her holding Solomon’s orb in an image flanked by the figures of Solomon and David. Despite these connections, modern scholars have devoted little attention to this particular royal image, focusing instead on her other biblical roles as Susanna, Esther, Judith, David, Joshua, Hezekiah, and Deborah. Studies by Margaret Aston, Carol Blessing, Susan Doran, John N. King, A. N. McLaren, Michele Osherow, Donald Stump, and Alexandra Walsham have made rich contributions to our understanding of how these figures provided crucial providential support for Elizabeth and her subjects to defend, and sometimes limit, female rule. Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Blessing, “Elizabeth I as Deborah the Judge: Exceptional Women of Power,” in Goddesses and Queens: The Iconography of Elizabeth I, ed. Annaliese Connolly and Lisa Hopkins, 19–33 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007)
Doran, “Virginity, Divinity and Power: The Portraits of Elizabeth I,” in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman, 171–99 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)
King, “The Godly Woman in Elizabethan Iconography,” Renaissance Quarterly 38 (Spring 1985): 41–84
McLaren, Political Culture in the Reign of Elizabeth I: Queen and Commonwealth, 1558–1585 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Osherow, “‘Give Ear O’ Princes’: Deborah, Elizabeth and the Right Word,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 30.1 (2004): 111–19
Stump, “Abandoning the Old Testament: Shifting Paradigms for Elizabeth, 1578–1582,” Explorations in Renaissance Culture 30.1 (2004): 89–109
Mary Hampson Patterson, Domesticating the Reformation: Protestant Best Sellers, Private Devotion, and the Revolution of English Piety (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Presses, 2007), p. 34.
Felch, “A Brief History of English Private Prayer Books,” in Felch’s Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s “Morning and Evening Prayers” (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 23
Georgia E. Brown observes that in these meditations and maxims “Elizabeth becomes an act of language that projects moral virtue”—a comment that brought to my attention how Cancellar is essentially making Elizabeth into a mirror for her people. See Brown, “Translation and the Definition of Sovereignty: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor,” in Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century: Selected Papers from the Second International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (2000), ed. Mike Pincombe, 88–103 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 100.
Janel Mueller and Joshua Scodel explain that Elizabeth may have translated Seneca’s epistle as a response to Mary’s actions in 1567. See Mueller and Scodel, Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 412–13.
MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), p. 110
Alford, “The Political Creed of William Cecil,” in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. John F. McDiarmid, 75–90 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007)
Great Britain Public Record Office, Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs, Preserved Principally in the Archives of Simancas, Elizabeth, 1568–79, vol. 2, ed. Martin S. Hume (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1894), p. 138.
Samuel Haynes, ed., A Collection of State Papers Relating to Affairs from the Years 1542–1570 left by William Cecil Lord Burghley (London: William Bowyer, 1740), p. 516.
As Anne Lake Prescott has described, “Whatever the English thought of him [Marot], many must have been aware that he had contributed to one of the major texts of French Protestantism.” French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 16.
For the negative tradition of Solomon, see William Tate, “Solomon, Gender, and Empire in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 37 (Spring 1997): 257–76.
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© 2010 Linda Shenk
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Shenk, L. (2010). Queen Solomon: Elizabeth I in Christian Prayers and Meditations (1569). In: Learned Queen. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101852_2
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