Gloriana's Face Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance

This collection of original essays focuses on the dichotomy between the public and private worlds of women from the early Renaissance to the 1650s. Contributors explore issues relating to feminist studies, gender criticism and women's history, as well as literature, the theatre, art history and the social history of ideas.;The essays are arranged to highlight the movement from the private Elizabethan woman to her more public Carolingean counterpart. Through the changing images of Elizabeth I's portraits, the book's introduction contextualizes the transformation from the iconographic queen to her more independent identity as Gloriana.;Individual essays explore women's diaries; the fashioning of Elizabeth I's political persona in her parliamentary speeches; and the maternal subtexts of Sidney's Arcadia and of King Lear. Other essays analyze the framing nomenclature associated with Shakespeare's Kates; the legal and linguistic subversion of "Much Ado About Nothing"; and the disruption of conventional women's identities in the Jacobean court masque. Finally, the radical puritanical sects are discussed in light of their feminist spirituality.