When Elizabeth Tudor was seven months old, she was displayed naked to the French ambassador and two other special envoys, so they might see and report that the marriage of the King of England and his new queen had been sanctioned by the birth of a child who was free from physical deformity. During the early decades of her reign, the Spanish ambassadors bribed Elizabeth's laundresses so that they might know if she had regular menstrual cycles. When the second round of French marriage negotiations began in 1579 (the queen was then 45 years old), Lord Burghley consulted her female servants and physicians in an effort to determine whether she was still capable of bearing children (he decided that she was). Attention to the monarch's body, to even its most intimate functions, was nothing new in early modern Europe. When that body was female, however, the scrutiny was different in kind.

The powers ascribed to male and female were asymmetrical in sixteenthcentury law, in sixteenth-century physiology, in sixteenth-century social life; when a female prince inherited the throne of England, she constituted both a practical and a representational crisis. The state was considered to hold a large proprietary interest in sexuality and procreation. Female chastity was the bearer of formidable ideological and practical significance; it was the indispensable guarantor of social coherence, legitimate title and the orderly maintenance and transfer of material wealth, including land tenure.