Elizabeth I's Foreign Correspondence ─ Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics

Elizabeth I's linguistic skills were never in doubt during her lifetime, and she put them to excellent use when she became Queen. Although she never left England, throughout her reign she wrote extensively to correspondents abroad, and her extant foreign correspondence ranges from the ceremonial to the religiously committed to the intimate and emotionally vulnerable. The relationships Elizabeth forged through these texts were of central importance to the diplomacy and politics of the period. This volume presents the findings of a major international research project on the Queen's correspondence, and includes newly edited texts and translations of fifteen of Elizabeth's holograph letters in foreign languages.

Carlo M. Bajetta is Professor of English at Universita della Valle d'Aosta, Italy. He is a contributor toThe Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) and the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, and his publications Sir Walter Ralegh (1998); Whole volumes in folio (2000); Some notes onPrinting and Publishing in Renaissance Venice (2000), and, with Luisa Camaiora,Shakespearean Readings: Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley (2004).

Guillaume Coatalen is a Senior Lecturer on early modern English literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, France. He has published editions of verse and commonplace books in manuscript and has written on Elizabeth I's correspondence in French.
Jonathan Gibson is a Lecturer in the English Department at The Open University, UK. He is the co-editor of two books on early modern women's manuscripts and the author of published essays on early modern letters, on the physical structure and the editing of miscellany manuscripts, on the translations and handwriting of Elizabeth I, and on Elizabethan and Jacobean translations from Latin, French, and Italian sources.