Overview

A new biographical portrait that casts the queen as she saw herself--not as an exceptional woman, but as an exceptional rulerQueen Elizabeth I was all too happy to play on courtly conventions of gender when it suited her weak and feeble woman's body to do so for political gain. But in Elizabeth, historian Lisa Hilton offers ample evidence of why those famous words should not be taken at face value. With new research out of France, Italy, Russia, and Turkey, Hilton's fresh interpretation is of a queen who saw herself primarily as a Renaissance prince and used Machiavellian statecraft to secure that position.A decade since the last major biography, this Elizabeth breaks new ground and depicts a queen who was much less constrained by her femininity than most treatments claim. For readers of David Starkey and Alison Weir, it will provide a new, complex perspective on Elizabeth's emotional and sexual life. It's a fascinating journey that shows how a marginalized, newly crowned queen, whose European contemporaries considered her to be the illegitimate ruler of a pariah nation, ultimately adapted to become England's first recognizably modern head of state.

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9781504673143

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Lisa Hilton is the acclaimed author of The Horror of Love, Mistress Peachum's Pleasure, Queens Consort: England's Medieval Queens, and The Real Queen of France: Athenais and Louis XIV. She is the author of two novels, the bestselling Wolves in Winter and The House with Blue Shutters, which was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Kelly Rose Birch was born in Kent, England, and has been using her voice to entertain and educate for more than twenty years. While still in England, she began her career as an actor with leading roles in such plays as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Salad Days. Since moving to America, Kelly Rose has continued her acting but has principally been a molecular epidemiologist in Berkeley, California.

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