Description - Of Chastity and Power by Philippa Berry
Elizabeth I was one of the most powerful women rulers in European history. What can feminism reveal about the attitudes of her male subjects towards this enigmatic figure? Philippa Berry combines Renaissance scholarship with feminist literary criticism to reject former accounts of the 'cult' of Elizabeth, which presented both the queen's gender and her marital status as unproblematic. Through readings of key Elizabethan texts by Lyly, Raleigh, Chapman, Shakespeare and Spenser, she shows that while Elizabeth's combination of chastity with political and religious power was repeatedly idealized, it was also perceived as extremely disturbing. By placing these texts within the wider context of European culture and history, Berry shows that the figure of the unmarried queen implicitly challenged the masculine focus of Renaissance discourses of love and of absolutist political ideology, ultimately subverting the philosophical division between spirit and matter upon which Renaissance ideas of women were founded.
In her exploration of the potent combination of themes of sexuality and politics with classical myth and Neoplatonic mysticism, Berry offers a radical reassessment of the status of 'woman' as a bearer of meaning within Renaissance literature and culture.
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