The letters of Queen Elizabeth I, 1590-1596. Weighing archival evidence

This dissertation investigates queen Elizabeth I's practices as a letterwriter. Recent developments in the fields of study concerned with the composition, circulation and reception of texts have elicited a growing interest into the forms and functions of Early Modern letters, thus equipping scholarship with a new framework in which to situate their texts and with new tools to analyse them (i.e. Daybell, 2006 and 2009; Schneider, 2005; Stewart and Wolfe, 2004). I argue that starting from the evidence of primary sources, such tools may be employed to take a fresh look at the Queen’s letters, in order to investigate in what ways the monarch's authorship can be assessed and to elucidate more details about the procedures of royal epistolary exchanges. The dissertation is structured into two parts. The first part describes the historical, physical and cultural setting in which letters by the Queen were initiated, composed, read and dispatched. In particular, chapter 2 provides an overview of the years 1590-1596 from a historical perspective and it addresses the structure and inner workings of the Elizabethan secretariat. Chapter 3 surveys the practices of letterwriting in Renaissance England focussing on letterwriting in the institutionalised court milieu. The second part deals with the evidence of letters themselves. It sets out with a survey of the Elizabethan archives and the material they preserve, to proceed then to the selection of sources and a presentation of the methodology in chapter 4. Chapter 5 analyses the documentary evidence of the selected royal missives in a material perspective and chapter 6 provides a closer examination of a number of signet, familiar and diplomatic letters by the Queen as case studies.