The anxiety provoked by the “female prince,” Elizabeth I, who reigned from 1558 to 1603, has been extensively debated in English literary and cultural studies. Louis Montrose, in an influential essay, considers Elizabeth's reign as exemplary of “the interplay between representations of gender and power in a stratified society in which authority is everywhere invested in men – everywhere, that is, except at the top.” To maintain this authority, Elizabeth resisted the demands from her male courtiers and all-male Parliament that she marry. Her authority as “female prince” was thus contingent on her anomalous position as a “virgin queen.” Yet, feminist critics have disputed this emphasis on Elizabeth's management and manipulation of male courtiers' anxieties about gender and power: Philippa Berry stresses her cultivation of a court culture centered on her ladies-in-waiting to the exclusion of more celebrated male courtiers; Christine Coch argues for her strategic use of maternal, rather than erotic, metaphors as the foundation for political authority; and Jennifer Summit presents her as authoring an ambivalent Petrarchan “poetics of queenship” to counter masculine domination. On the whole, however, discussions of Elizabeth as a “woman on top” of an otherwise patriarchal society have remained within the bounds of the British Isles, occasionally extending their comparisons to continental Europe.

This chapter engages the debate over contested representations of women's sovereignty during the age of Elizabeth by moving away from an anglocentric, or even a conventional eurocentric, focus.