A Queenly Education

Abstract

Set high upon a stage—This description of Mary’s role in the tournament pageantry that took place at Kennington in 1507 seems particularly apt, given the way it presages her lifelong presence on the international stage of sixteenth-century court politics. This poem and its companion, “The Justes of the Month of June,” record Mary’s position at the center of the tournament’s conceit. Standing on a flower-strewn stage, acting the part of the Queen of May, Mary issues the challenge, receives still more floral tributes from the knights, and rewards the winner with a ring. At the age of eleven, she is already participating in the chi-valric rhetoric of the Tudor court, already starting to learn how the precepts of chivalry could be used to upset traditional gender hierarchy.