EBOOK Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I

More than any other English monarch before or since, Queen Elizabeth I used her        annual progresses to shape her royal persona and to bolster her popularity and        authority. During the spring and summer, accompanied by her court, Elizabeth toured        southern England, the Midlands, and parts of the West Country, staying with private        and civic hosts, and at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The progresses        provided hosts with unique opportunities to impress and influence the Queen,and        became occasions for magnificent and ingenious entertainments and pageants, drawing        on the skills of architects, artists, and craftsmen, as well as dramatic        performances, formal orations, poetic recitations, parades, masques, dances, and        bear baiting.The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I is an        interdisciplinary essay collection, drawing together new and innovative work by        experts in literary studies, history, theatre and performance studies, art history,        and antiquarian studies. As such, it will make a unique and timely contribution to        research on the culture and history of Elizabethan England. Chapters include        examinations of some of the principal Elizabethan progress entertainments, including        thecoronation pageant Veritas temporis filia (1559), Kenilworth (1575), Norwich        (1578), Cowdray (1591), Bisham (1592), and Harefield (1602), while other chapters        consider the themes raised by these events, including the ritual of gift-giving; the        conduct of government whilst on progress; the significance of thevisual arts in the        entertainments; regional identity and militarism; elite and learned women as hosts;        the circulation and publication of entertainment and pageant texts; the afterlife of        the Elizabethan progresses, including their reappropriation in Caroline England and        the documenting of Elizabeth's reign by late eighteenth- and early        nineteenth-century antiquarians such as John Nichols, who went on to compile the        monumentalThe Progresses of Queen Elizabeth (1788-1823).