Introduction

NOTES NOTES In the notes that follow, I hope to meet the needs of a variety of readers. I have included not only specific references for quotations and citations but also references to secondary works that have influenced my thinking in critical ways. The notes also provide additional references for those readers who may want to read more widely. At times, they take the form of brief explanatory or background essays that I hope will be of use to some readers. Introduction 1. John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (Geneva, 1558), sig. 9 (text modernized). Knox’s “blast” is included in David Laing, ed., The Works of John Knox (Edinburgh, 1855), vol. 4, 363-420 (the quotation cited appears on p. 373). I have used many different sources in this study, including early printed books, like Knox’s, and original letters and documents printed in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century editions. In order to make the documents more accessible for readers, I have on occasion standardized the spelling and punctuation of the quotations that appear in the text; where I have modernized the text, I have so indicated in the notes. 2. After Knox, among the more notable entries in the lengthy debate about female rulers are John Gilby, An Admonition to England and Scotland to Call Them to Repentance (Geneva, 1558); Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed of Their Subjects . (Geneva, 1558); Richard Bertie, “These answers were made by Mr. Richard Bertie, husband to the lady Catherine Duchess of Suffolk against the book of John Knox, 1558,” British Library MS Additional 48043 (Yelverton MS 48), fols. 1-9; John Aylmer, An Harbor for Faithful and True Subjects against the Late Blown Blast Concerning the Government of Women . (London, 1559); John Leslie, Defense of the Honour of . Marie Queen of Scots (London, 1569); Henry Howard, “A Dutifull Defence of the Lawfull Regiment of Women,” British Library MS Lansdowne 813; Jean 230 / THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN Bodin, Six Livres de la République (Paris, 1576); David Chambers, Discours de la légitime succession des femmes aux possessions de leurs parents; & du gouvernement des princesses aux empires & royaumes (Paris, 1579); Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum: The Manner of Government or Policy of the Realm of England . (London, 1583); John Case, Sphaera Civitatis (Oxford, 1588); Denis Godefroy, Praxis civilis et antiquis et recentioribus authoribus Germanis, Italis, Gallis, Hispanis, Belgis et Aliis (Frankfurt, 1591); Pierre Grégoire, De Republica (Frankfurt, 1597); Richard Knolles, The Six Books of a Commonwealth (London, 1606), a translation of Bodin; Giovanni Stefano Menochi, Institutiones politicae e sacris scripturis depromptae (Lyons, 1625); Robert Filmer, Patriarchia (London, 1680); and Bishop Jacques Bossuet, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture Sainte (probably written about 1680, but published Paris, 1709). Analysis of the “gynecocracy debate” has appeared regularly: James E. Phillips, Jr., “The Background of Spenser’s Attitude Toward Women Rulers,” The Huntington Library Quarterly, 5 (1941), 5-32; Mortimer Levine, The Early Elizabethan Succession Question, 1558-1568 (Stanford, California, 1966); Paula Louise Scalingi, “The Scepter or the Distaff: The Question of Female Sover- eignty, 1516-1607,” The Historian, 41 (1978), 59-75; Levine, “The Place of Women in Tudor Government,” in Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G.R. Elton from his American Friends, ed. Delloyd J. Guth and John W. McKenna (Cambridge, 1982), 109-23; Retha M. Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport, Connecticut, 1983), 47-66 (Chapter 4: “Queens Regnant and the Royal Supremacy, 1525-1587”); Constance Jordan, “Woman’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly, 40 (1987), 421-51; Patricia-Ann Lee, “ ‘Bodye Politique to Governe’: Aylmer, Knox and the Debate on Queenship,” The Historian, 52 (1990), 242-61; Robert M. Healey, “Waiting for Deborah: John Knox and Four Ruling Queens,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 25 (1994), 371-86; Susan Felch, “The Rhetoric of Biblical Authority: John Knox and the Question of Women,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 26 (1995), 805-22; and Judith M. Richards, “ ‘To Promote a Woman to Beare Rule’: Talking of Queens in Mid-Tudor England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 28 (1997), 101-21. The most extended analysis of the gynecocracy debate in England is Amanda Shephard, Gender and Authority in Sixteenth-Century England: The Knox Debate (Keele, Staffordshire, England, 1994). 3. The term “early modern” is a slippery one. I use it here to include the period from the late fifteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries: while incorpo- rating as many earlier precedents for women rulers as I can, I have included as “early modern” those women who may have been born in the late fifteenth century but who lived into the sixteenth and those who might have lived into the seventeenth but who were born in the sixteenth. This corresponds to the “long sixteenth century,” a term coined by Fernand Braudel and referred to throughout the Handbook of European History, 1400-1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, ed. Thomas A. Brady Jr., Heido A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1994); on the significance of this period, see “Introduction: Renaissance and Reformation, Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era,” vol. 1, xii-xxii. There is a great deal of fluidity in the periods we label “medieval” and “early NOTES / 231 modern,” however, and scholarly works reflect this. Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), identifies the period 1500-1750 as “early modern” (3), while Natalie Zeamon Davis and Arlette Farge mark out “the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries” in their introduction (“Women as Historical Actors,” p. 1) to Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes, vol. 3 of A History of Women (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993). In her essay “Women in the Renaissance” in the newest edition of Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 3rd ed. (New York, 1998), 153-73, Carole Levin focuses on the period from 1350 to 1600 (she also addresses the question of whether to use the term “Renaissance” or “early modern,” the phrase I have chosen). As further examples of this fluidity in periodization, an essay on Louise of Savoy (d. 1531) is included in Medieval Queenship (New York, 1993, 117-41), edited by John Carmi Parsons, while an essay on Christine de Pizan (d. c. 1434) appears in Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women (Albany, New York, 1995), edited by Carole Levin and Patricia A. Sullivan. 4. The phrase is used by Wiesner in her discussion of “Gender and Political Power” in Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 241. 5. According to Arin Woolf, “Apart from France, with her interpretation of the Salic Law to exclude female succession, and the Empire, with its elected rulers who were always male, all other European kingdoms had the possibility of installing a reigning queen—not very often, but nonetheless in a considerable number of cases” (“Reigning Queens in Medieval Europe: When, Where and Why,” in Medieval Queenship, 169). Woolf calculates that, between 1100 and 1600, some 20 women reigned as queens in their own right (Woolf excludes women of lesser rank and those who acted as regents for husbands and sons in his count). 6. René de la Croix, duc de Castries, The Lives of the Kings and Queens of France, trans. Anne Dobell (New York, 1979). 7. Victor-L. Tapié, The Rise and Fall of the Habsburg Monarchy, trans. Stephen Hardman (New York, 1971). 8. For genealogical tables noting only the sons of Edward III, see sources as diverse as J.D. Mackie, The Oxford History of England, vol. 7: The Earlier Tudors, 1485-1558 (Oxford, 1952); Charles Ross, Edward IV (Berkeley, California, 1974); and Michael Hicks, Who’s Who in British History, vol. 3: Who’s Who in Late Medieval England (1272-1485) (London, 1991). Even the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica lists only “5 daughters”—underneath “2 sons died young” (15th ed., vol. 9, 501). 9. Victor-L. Tapié, France in the Age of Louix XIII and Richelieu, trans. D. Lockie (Cambridge, 1974; rpt. New York, 1984). 10. G. F. Young, The Medici, vol. 2 (New York, 1909). 11. With a nod to Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, 1975), 124-51. 12. My reconception of the biographical essays in this volume has been informed by Gerda Lerner’s chapter “Female Clusters, Female Networks, Social Spaces,” in her Women and History, vol. 2: The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy (New York, 1993), 220-46. 13. Studies focusing on women and queenship are now appearing with some frequency. See, for example, Louise Olga Fradenburg, ed., Women and Sover- 232 / THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN eignty (Edinburgh, 1992); Parsons, Medieval Queenship; Levin and Sullivan, Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women; and Anne J. Duggan, ed., Queens and Queenship in Medieval Europe (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1997). Chapter 1 1. Isabella’s address to Ferdinand on the subject of the Castilian succession is quoted by Nancy Rubin, Isabella of Castile, the First Renaissance Queen (New York, 1991), 131. Margaret Beaufort’s letter to her son is printed by Anne Crawford, ed., Letters of the Queens of England, 1100-1547 (Stroud, England, 1994), 149. Caterina Sforza’s letter to her uncle Ludovico Sforza is printed by Pier Desiderio Pasolini, Caterina Sforza (Rome, 1893), vol. 3, 303 (my translation). Anne of France’s instructions—enseignements—for her daughter Suzanne of Bourbon are printed by A. M. Chazaud, ed., Les Enseignements d’Anne de France, duchesse de Bourbonnois et d’Auvergne a sa fille Susanne de Bourbon . (Moulins, France, 1878), 20 (my translation).

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