The hermaphroditic rhetoric of Elizabeth I's letters

Abstract

My reading of Elizabeth I's letters challenges the view of a queen who capitalized solely on a gynocentric model of sovereignty to legitimate her rule. The varied rhetorics in Elizabeth's letters reveal an interlocutor highly skilled in gender code-switching. The patterns of circulation of Elizabeth's letters indicate that such code-switching helped disrupt the gender codes of early modern England; her letters circulated among multiple audiences, including the "authors" of contemporary commonplace books, as I discovered in my research at the Folger Library. The queen's correspondence so often interchanges customary notions of both "feminine" and "masculine" honor that in her letters she is politically and linguistically hermaphroditic.