Chapter 3. From ornament to armament

Abstract

Queen Elizabeth I is recognised as a monarch for whom language was an essential tool in the construction of her authority and the maintenance of her rule. This can be seen directly through her state communication e.g. parliamentary speeches, or more indirectly in her activities in literary translation and poetry undertaken throughout her life and reign. This paper explores two early examples of her epistolary writing – a letter to her stepmother, Queen Katherine Parr (1544) and a later epistle (written in 1554) to her sister, Mary I – to explore how the pre-accessional Elizabeth developed these skills in rhetoric and literary style. It combines a literary stylistic approach with Renaissance rhetorical concepts to describe and evaluate how the epistolary language achieves identity and inter-personal work, and how this can be seen to inform Elizabeth’s later epistolary practices as queen.

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