Author: Jemma Field Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 1526142511 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
Approaching the Stuart courts through the lens of the queen consort, Anna of Denmark, this study is underpinned by three key themes: translating cultures, female agency and the role of kinship networks and genealogical identity for early modern royal women. Illustrated with a fascinating array of objects and artworks, the book follows a trajectory that begins with Anna’s exterior spaces before moving to the interior furnishings of her palaces, the material adornment of the royal body, an examination of Anna’s visual persona and a discussion of Anna’s performance of extraordinary rituals that follow her life cycle. Underpinned by a wealth of new archival research, the book provides a richer understanding of the breadth of Anna’s interests and the meanings generated by her actions, associations and possessions.
Author: Clare McManus Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 9780719062506 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
Through detailed historicized and interdisciplinary readings of the performances of Anna Denmark in the Scottish and English Jacobean Courts, Women on the Renaissance Stage fundamentally reassesses women's relationship to early modern performance. It investigates the staging conditions, practices, and gendering of Denmark's performances, and brings current critical theorizations of race, class, gender, space, and performance to bear on the female court of the early 17th century.
Author: Susan Dunn-Hensley Publisher: Springer ISBN: 3319632272 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 235
Book Description
This book examines how early Stuart queens navigated their roles as political players and artistic patrons in a culture deeply conflicted about the legitimacy of female authority. Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria both employed powerful female archetypes such as Amazons and the Virgin Mary in court performances. Susan Dunn-Hensley analyzes how darker images of usurping, contaminating women, epitomized by the witch, often merged with these celebratory depictions. By tracing these competing representations through the Jacobean and Caroline periods, Dunn-Hensley peels back layers of misogyny from historical scholarship and points to rich new lines of inquiry. Few have written about Anna’s religious beliefs, and comparing her Catholicism with Henrietta Maria’s illuminates the ways in which both women were politically subversive. This book offers an important corrective to centuries of negative representation, and contributes to a fuller understanding of the role of queenship in the English Civil War and the fall of the Stuart monarchy.
Author: Judith Lissauer Cromwell Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 147663582X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
Queen Anne (1665-1714) was not charismatic, brilliant or beautiful, but under her rule, England rose from the chaos of regicide, civil war and revolution to the cusp of global supremacy. She fought a successful overseas war against Europe's superpower and her moderation kept the crown independent of party warfare at home. This biography reveals Anne Stuart as resolute, kind and practical--a woman who surmounted personal tragedy and poor health to become a popular and effective ruler.
Author: John Leeds Barroll Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN: 9780812235746 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
In the well-entrenched critical view of the Jacobean period, James I is credited with the flowering of culture in the early years of the seventeenth century. His queen, Anna of Denmark, is seen as a shadowy figure at best, a capricious and shallow one at worst. But Leeds Barroll makes a well-documented case that it was Anna who, for her own purposes, developed an alternative court and sponsored many of the other artistic ventures in one of the most productive and innovative periods of English cultural history. Married at seventeen, Anna soon became a shrewd and powerful player in the court politics of Scotland and, later, England. Her influence can be seen in James's choices for advisors and beneficiaries of royal attention. In fact, James's and Anna's longstanding dispute over the raising of the heir, Henry, caused a major scandal of the time and was suspected as a plot against the king's safety. In order to assert her own power, Anna actually forced a miscarriage upon herself, an extraordinary event that is referred to in much unnoticed contemporary diplomatic correspondence. An important feature of court entertainment and literary production at this time was the development of the extravagant drama known as the masque, which reached its literary peak in the works of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. Barroll argues that it was in fact Anna and not James who encouraged and staged the masques, as a way of defining both a social and political identity for the royal consort, a role that had been nonexistent under Elizabeth. Barroll's work on Anna's patronage also sets Shakespeare's company in a broader context. By writing the cultural biography of Anna of Denmark, queen of England, Leeds Barroll reestablishes the influential and distinctive role of the queen consort in early modern Europe.
Author: Catherine Curzon Publisher: Pen and Sword History ISBN: 1473872650 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
This royal biography of the 17th century princess and mother of King George II recounts an epic tale of privilege, passion, scandal, and disgrace. When Sophia Dorothea of Celle married her first cousin, the future King George I, she was an unhappy bride. Filled with dreams of romance and privilege, she hated the groom she called “pig snout” and wept at news of her engagement. When she arrived in the austere court of Hanover, the vibrant young princess found herself ignored and unwanted—while her husband openly gallivanted with his mistress. Then Sophia Dorothea plunged into a dangerous affair with the dashing soldier Count Phillip Christoph von Königsmarck, a man as celebrated for his looks as his bravery. When he and Sophia Dorothea fell in love, they were dicing with death. Watched by a scheming countess who had ambitions of her own, it was only a matter of time before scandal gripped the House of Hanover. In the end, Sophia Dorothea was divorced, disgraced, and locked away in a gilded cage for 30 years—whilst her lover faced an even darker fate.
Author: Klaus Rifbjerg Publisher: ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
The story of an ambassador's wife who struggles between her societal role and her desire to face herself, to explore her own potentialities. The story of her breakdown, flight, and eventual psychic reintegration is suspenseful and moving in both its dramatic and psychological action.
Author: Heather R. Darsie Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited ISBN: 1445677113 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 366
Book Description
A fresh look at Anne of Cleves’ life as a German noblewoman, and the Continental politics that affected her marriage. Did the doomed union really cause the fall and execution of Thomas Cromwell?
Author: Anne Somerset Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 030796289X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 871
Book Description
She ascended the thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1702, at age thirty-seven, Britain’s last Stuart monarch, and five years later united two of her realms, England and Scotland, as a sovereign state, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. She had a history of personal misfortune, overcoming ill health (she suffered from crippling arthritis; by the time she became Queen she was a virtual invalid) and living through seventeen miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature births in seventeen years. By the end of her comparatively short twelve-year reign, Britain had emerged as a great power; the succession of outstanding victories won by her general, John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, had humbled France and laid the foundations for Britain’s future naval and colonial supremacy. While the Queen’s military was performing dazzling exploits on the continent, her own attention—indeed her realm—rested on a more intimate conflict: the female friendship on which her happiness had for decades depended and which became for her a source of utter torment. At the core of Anne Somerset’s riveting new biography, published to great acclaim in England (“Definitive”—London Evening Standard; “Wonderfully pacy and absorbing”—Daily Mail), is a portrait of this deeply emotional, complex bond between two very different women: Queen Anne—reserved, stolid, shrewd; and Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, wife of the Queen’s great general—beautiful, willful, outspoken, whose acerbic wit was equally matched by her fearsome temper. Against a fraught background—the revolution that deposed Anne’s father, James II, and brought her to power . . . religious differences (she was born Protestant—her parents’ conversion to Catholicism had grave implications—and she grew up so suspicious of the Roman church that she considered its doctrines “wicked and dangerous”) . . . violently partisan politics (Whigs versus Tories) . . . a war with France that lasted for almost her entire reign . . . the constant threat of foreign invasion and civil war—the much-admired historian, author of Elizabeth I (“Exhilarating”—The Spectator; “Ample, stylish, eloquent”—The Washington Post Book World), tells the extraordinary story of how Sarah goaded and provoked the Queen beyond endurance, and, after the withdrawal of Anne’s favor, how her replacement, Sarah’s cousin, the feline Abigail Masham, became the ubiquitous royal confidante and, so Sarah whispered to growing scandal, the object of the Queen's sexual infatuation. To write this remarkably rich and passionate biography, Somerset, winner of the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, has made use of royal archives, parliamentary records, personal correspondence and previously unpublished material. Queen Anne is history on a large scale—a revelation of a centuries-overlooked monarch.
Author: Steven Veerapen Publisher: ISBN: 9781789973433 Category : Great Britain Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
"On the death of Elizabeth I, Anne of Denmark, wife to James VI and I, became the first queen consort of both England and Scotland. She offered her subjects north and south of the border an ideal of consortship: an attractive, fecund woman with a flair for display. Yet, history has been far from kind to the first British consort. Anne has been castigated as frivolous, vain, stupid, and more interested in dancing and pleasure than politics. This is unfair. As scholarship has recently begun to show, the queen was a determined, intelligent woman whose contributions to the cultural lives of her kingdoms was to prove of major importance in late-Renaissance Britain. This study aims to contextualise Anne not as a woman of minor significance in relation to the queens regnant of the sixteenth century, but as an inheritor of the bloody legacies of previous consorts north and south of the border. What emerges is a woman of wit, intelligence, and taste, who exploited political faction to her benefit and that of her children; who was canny enough to manage a slippery husband and sovereign; who sought creative avenues to mitigate the increasingly troublesome issue of her foreignness; and who provided the public face of monarchy in the teeth of an errant king who placed little stock in public opinion"--
Author: Jemma Field
Author: Clare McManus
Author: Susan Dunn-Hensley
Author: Judith Lissauer Cromwell
Author: John Leeds Barroll
Author: Catherine Curzon
Author: Klaus Rifbjerg
Author: Heather R. Darsie
Author: Anne Somerset
Author: Steven Veerapen