This is the first book to examine Elizabeth I's lasting impact on the Anglo-American historical imagination. John Watkins attributes her abiding popularity to her iconic role in seventeenth-century debates over the nature of sovereignty. Watkins focuses on England's most turbulent century because it witnessed the consolidation of enduring attitudes toward both the Tudor past and the English monarchy. He explains that seventeenth-century representations of Elizabeth intersected with the period's wider debate over the sovereign's relationship to the people. He goes on to trace the development of Elizabeth's iconic significance as the century moves on; the stories of Princess Elizabeth's sufferings under Mary Tudor, or of her secret longings for Essex eventually figured more prominently in the popular imagination than records of her relationships with Parliament. By the early eighteenth century Elizabeth had acquired a new value as a model of the tragic individual pitted against a hostile social order.
- ISBN13 9780521118965
- Publish Date 3 September 2009 (first published 8 August 2002)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Cambridge University Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 282
- Language English