Fairy Tale Queens
Representations of Early Modern Queenship
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The Queen’s Deathbed Wish in Early Modern Fairy Tales: Securing the Dynasty
In the early modern fairy tale canon, an unusual trope begins many tales: the queen’s deathbed wish. Before she dies, the ailing queen asks that if the king marries again, it must be to someone whose finger pe...
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Poisoning Queens in Early Modern Fact and Fiction
Beloved, virtuous, and capable queens are plentiful in early modern history and literature, but it is the figure of the wicked queen that has an especially tenacious hold on our imaginations. Nefarious female m....
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Early Modern Queens and the Intersection of Fairy Tales and Fact
Amid-sixteenth-century tale describes a powerful, conniving queen who sends a scented apple to a rival prince. The prince’s vigilant servant, suspicious of the gift, first feeds a piece of the fruit to his dog.....
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The Queen’s (In)Fertile Body and the Body Politic
Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife, was the only one of his six queens to provide him with a male heir. Twelve days after she gave birth to the future Edward VI in October 1537, she died from complications r....
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Men, Women, and Beasts: Elizabeth I and Beastly Bridegrooms
In 2001, in the online magazine Nerve, philosopher Peter Singer published a review of Dearest Pet, naturalist Midas Dekker’s book on the history of bestiality. In his review, “Heavy Petting,” Singer points out t...
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The Queen’s Wardrobe: Dressing the Part
In the early modern period, the possession of beauty was considered a sine qua non for queenship even if human imperfections and individual preferences meant that the ideal was often unattainable. Queens were e....
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Maternal Monstrosities: Queens and the Reproduction of Heirs and Errors
Although both of Mary Tudor’s assumed pregnancies turned out to be false, stories still circulated that she had delivered a “shapeless mass.” More egregious rumors claimed that the fetus was a lapdog or a marmo....
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The Fairest of Them All: Queenship and Beauty
Giambattista Basile’s fairy tales are known for their exuberant berant language in contrast to the “chaste compactness” Walter Benjamin claimed as a defining feature of most fairy tales.1 Basile’s portrayal of a...
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The Queen’s Body: Promiscuity at Court
Good queens and bad queens constitute one of the most prominent binaries of the fairy tale genre, a contrast that is also familiar in characterizations of actual queens: Bloody Mary, Wicked Catherine de Médicis....
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Introduction
Though Anne Bradstreet was not born until almost a decade after the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, the tremendous impact of having a queen on the throne of England for much of the latter part of the sixte...
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“Honoured Hippolyta, Most Dreaded Amazonian”: The Amazon Queen in the Works of Shakespeare and Fletcher
English and continental literature from the late Middle Ages well into the seventeenth century includes numerous references to Amazon queens, from Christine de Pizans The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405 to Tho...
