Queen and Scholar: Elizabeth Tudor and Wisdom Imagery

What does it mean for a queen to be wise? In the context of early modern English Protestantism, wisdom was predominantly understood as a response to divine revelation, often mediated through scriptural authority. For a queen like Elizabeth Tudor, whose accession revived anxieties about women’s fitness to rule, the demonstration of Protestant erudition was an essential aspect of performing her suitability for godly governance. This thesis explores wisdom imagery in the representation and self-representation of Elizabeth. As such, it is a study of ways in which the display of godly wisdom and biblical scholarship were key to assuaging anxieties about female authority in sixteenth-century England. Scholars of queenship have focused our attention on what Susan Frye has termed ‘the competition for representation’. My thesis builds on this work to examine how wisdom imagery became a way for both the queen and her subjects to negotiate the representation of female authority. Linda Shenk has already explored the double-edged nature of ‘learned authority’, but she has focused on diplomatic and international perspectives. I assess it primarily in domestic contexts. I also explore Elizabeth’s use of Greek texts, identifying for the first time the source of a Greek verse published under her name in 1548, and I examine under-studied neo-Latin panegyric, including some transcribed here for the first time. I examine the entire period of the life of Elizabeth Tudor, but this final version of the thesis is weighted towards the first decades of Elizabeth’s life and reign. I make extensive use of writings published in the queen’s name, but I explore them alongside texts in which her subjects made clear their own demanding definitions of royal wisdom. Many contemporaries participated in Elizabeth Tudor’s strategies to present herself as a wise queen, but others used wisdom imagery to express anxieties about her competence