Elizabeth I’s Royal Progresses: A Study of Formal Orations and Poetic Recitations

The present study examines the rhetoric of inconsistency in the representation of Queen Elizabeth I through a reading of formal orations and poetic recitations written during her royal progresses. These literary resources, which were deliberately designed to promote the Elizabethan monarchy, offer illuminating examples of Elizabeth’s struggle to cultivate a distinctive royal identity. I would suggest that the tactical rhetorical practice of creating paradoxical images was an essential constituent of Elizabeth’s statecraft to cement her authority and reinforce her legitimacy. Indeed, the deployment of a discourse of contradiction that shaped Elizabeth’s progresses was a necessary and practical approach to overcome the vulnerability of an unmarried female monarch. The analysis of contradictory imagery is a valuable contribution to comprehend the complexity of Elisabeth’s representation and her strategies of exercising power in a patriarchal society. The research shows that Elizabeth employed the medium of creating ambiguous images as a rhetorical tactic to overcome gender bias against the female monarchy, and her courtiers utilized the same approach to advance their own agendas. It explores two ambiguous representations: masculine/ feminine portrayal and virgin/ maternal depiction.

Elizabeth I’s Royal Progresses: A Study of Formal Orations and Poetic Recitations

The present study examines the rhetoric of inconsistency in the representation of Queen Elizabeth I through a reading of formal orations and poetic recitations written during her royal progresses. These literary resources, which were deliberately designed to promote the Elizabethan monarchy, offer illuminating examples of Elizabeth’s struggle to cultivate a distinctive royal identity. I would suggest that the tactical rhetorical practice of creating paradoxical images was an essential constituent of Elizabeth’s statecraft to cement her authority and reinforce her legitimacy. Indeed, the deployment of a discourse of contradiction that shaped Elizabeth’s progresses was a necessary and practical approach to overcome the vulnerability of an unmarried female monarch. The analysis of contradictory imagery is a valuable contribution to comprehend the complexity of Elisabeth’s representation and her strategies of exercising power in a patriarchal society. The research shows that Elizabeth employed the medium of creating ambiguous images as a rhetorical tactic to overcome gender bias against the female monarchy, and her courtiers utilized the same approach to advance their own agendas. It explores two ambiguous representations: masculine/ feminine portrayal and virgin/ maternal depiction.

Mirabai in Popular Imagination

The immense popularity of Mirabai, the sixteenth-century bhakti poet-saint, transcends time and space. Beliefs have it that she renounced her kshatriya and royal identity for spiritual pursuits in the public domain. She was challenged, critiqued, ostracised, and castigated within her community and was labelled as a woman of questionable character. Mirabai wandered to various places, singing and dancing to bhajans negotiating the public and the private while becoming both virtuous and promiscuous in multiple narratives. Mirabai has been accommodated within the marginalised and subaltern communities and gradually, a community of destitute women has formed around her. With the revival of Mirabai during the Indian ‘nationalist’ period by popular spokespersons such as Swami Vivekananda and Mahatma Gandhi as an ‘ideal’ and ‘chaste’ historical character in their public speeches and private letters, the promiscuous image of Mirabai, perpetuated through centuries, witnessed transgressions and she was eventually elevated to the status of a saint. This paper with literary, biographical and hagiographical representations explores the mechanism of the paradoxical plane that allowed the promiscuous image of Mirabai to achieve sainthood and become a cult name in the bhakti tradition.

Devotional Sovereignty

This book investigates the shifting articulations of kingship in a wide variety of literary (Sanskrit and Kannada), visual, and material courtly productions in the South Indian kingdom of Mysore during the reigns of Tipu Sultan (r. 1782–1799) and Krishnaraja Wodeyar III (r. 1799–1868). Tipu Sultan was a Muslim king famous for resisting British dominance until his death, and Krishnaraja III was a Hindu king who succumbed to British political and administrative control. Both of their courts dealt with the changing political landscape of the period by turning to the religious and mythical past to construct a royal identity for their kings. With their use of religious narrative to articulate their kingship, the changing conceptions of sovereignty that accompanied burgeoning British colonial hegemony did not result in languishing. The religious past, instead, provided an idiom through which the Mysore courts could articulate their kings’ unique claims to kingship in the region, as they attributed their rule to divine election and increasingly employed religious vocabularies in a variety of courtly genres and media. What emerges within this material is an increasing reliance on devotion to frame Mysore kingship in relation to the kings’ changing role in regional politics. The emphasis on devotion for the constitution of Indian sovereignty in this period had lasting effects on Indian national politics as it provided an ideological basis for united Indian sovereignty that could simultaneously integrate and transcend premodern forms of regional kingship and its association with local deities.