Giving Time to Women: the Eternizing Project in Early Modern England

Abstract

In the 1570s, during a decade of heightened interest in the queen’s age as she approached menopause, Elizabeth began receiving a new kind of gift: ornamental timepieces intended to be worn on her body. In 1571, the Earl of Leicester gave her ‘one armlet or shakell of golde, all over fairely garnished with rubyes and dyamondes, haveing in the closing thereof a clocke’. In 1578 and again in 1580, Leicester gave the Queen pendants containing watches, while from the Earl of Russell she received a ‘diall’ set in a ring of golde. Elizabeth received half a dozen such timepieces in the 1570s, most ornately decorated with female figures or with popular feminine symbols, such as flowers. From the inventory at the queen’s death come descriptions of a ‘clock of gold curiously wrought with flowers and beasts, with a queene on the top of th’one side’; ‘one clocke of golde wrought like deyses and paunseyues, garnished with little sparks of diamonds, rubies, and emerodes’; a ‘little watch of christall … with her Ma’ties picture in it’; several watches fashioned like flowers, and one decorated with three antique women. Many of the queen’s watches contained chiming mechanisms or alarms to make time audible, as well as visible. One unusual alarm-ring contained a small prong which ‘gently’ scratched the queen’s finger to alert her to the passage of time. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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