Abstract
Isaiah 49 describes how God will preserve and care for God’s people, and verse 23 provided important Scriptural support for Queen Elizabeth I as a female ruler. John Calvin cited Isaiah 49:23 when writing to William Cecil to justify the rule of extraordinary women.2 The Oxford English Dictionary notes that “nurse” in the sixteenth century referred to either a wet nurse or a person who nurtured or cared for others.3 Depictions of Elizabeth as a “nurse” of the Church were not uncommon and the connotation became part of Elizabethan imagery. During Elizabeth’s 1578 visit to the city of Norwich, the mayor lauded her as “thou Nurse of religion, Mother of the Commonwealth, Beauty of Princes, Solace of thy Subjects,” and the schoolmaster’s oration also acknowledged Elizabeth as the mother of the commonwealth and the country, nursing the people as a nurse suckled her babes. Even the epitaph on her funeral monument described her as a “nurse of religion and learning.”4
And Kings shall be thy nursing fathers,
and Queens shall be thy nurses:
they shall worship thee with their faces toward the earth,
and lick up the dust of thy feet:
and thou shalt know that I am the Lord:
for they shall not be ashamed that wait for me.
—Isaiah 49:231
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Notes
John Calvin to Sir William Cecil, after January 29, 1559, The Zurich Letters, Comprising the Correspondence of Several English Bishops and Others with some of the Helvetian Reformers During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Second Series, A.D. 1558–1602, ed. Hastings Robinson (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1845), 35.
Louis A. Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006), 86;
and Peter Sherlock, “The Monuments of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart: King James and the Manipulation of Memory,” Journal of British Studies 46 (April 2007): 281.
Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 90. McCullough speculated that the sermon was so popular because it titillated Elizabethan audiences.
Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 4.
Linda Shenk, Learned Queen: The Image of Elizabeth I in Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 35.
Peter McCullough, “Out of Egypt: Richard Fletcher’s Sermon before Elizabeth I after the Execution of Mary Queen of Scots,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998), 119.
Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1994), 36.
Mary Morrissey, “Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons,” The Historical Journal 42 (December 1999): 1112;
and Cyndia Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 221–22. In the seventeenth century, Peter Heylyn remarked that Elizabeth’s government would always “tune the pulpits” whenever there was business or announcements to spread among the populace; McCullough, Sermons at Court, 59.
Margaret Christian, “Elizabeth’s Preachers and the Government of Women: Defining and Correcting a Queen,” Sixteenth Century Journal 24 (Autumn 1993): 562, 571.
Admonishment and calling listeners to repentance through preaching became the chief responsibility of ministers in the English Reformation. See Eric Josef Carlson, “The Boring of the Ear: Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540–1640,” in Preachers and the People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period, ed. Larissa Taylor (Leiden: Brill, 2001); and McCullough, “Out of Egypt,” 130–34.
Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 310–11.
John Jewel, Certaine sermons preached before the Queenes Maiestie, and at Paules crosse, by the reuerend father Iohn Ievvel late Bishop of Salisburie (London: Christopher Barker, 1583), iiiv.
Richard Curteys, A Sermon preached before the Queenes Maiestie, by the reuerende Father in God the Bishop of Chichester, at Grenewich, the. 14. day of Marche. 1573 (London: Henry Binneman, 1573), Aiiv. There had been much debate in the sixteenth century on the propriety of printing sermons based on the argument that the printed word could not replace the spoken word of God that was preached. Of the sermons examined in this article, only Brown defended his work against the charge that a printed sermon was not as beneficial as a preached sermon, although Arnold Hunt noted that apologizing for printing a sermon was common in the 1500s; Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 121.
Gordon Goodwin, “Edes, Richard (bap. 1554, d. 1604),” rev. Tom Beaumont James, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford UP, 2004; online edition, January 2008, http://o-www.oxforddnb.com.library.unl.edu/view/article/8461 (accessed November 30, 2012).
Christine Coch, “‘Mother of my Contreye’: Elizabeth I and Tudor Constructions of Motherhood,” English Literary Renaissance 26.3 (1996): 425, 442–44.
Donald Stump, “Abandoning the Old Testament: Protestant Dissent and the Shift in Court Paradigms for Elizabeth,” in Elizabeth I and the “Sovereign Arts”: Essays in Literature, History, and Culture, eds. Donald Stump, Linda Shenk, and Carole Levin (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2011), 292;
Jacqueline Vanhoutte, “Elizabeth I as Stepmother,” English Literary Renaissance 39.2 (May 2009): 325, 331; and Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen, 77.
David Loades, Elizabeth I (London: Hambledon and London, 2003), 145;
and Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), 75.
Constance Jordan, “Woman’s Rule in Sixteenth-Century British Political Thought,” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (Autumn 1987): 421, 426.
Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI Sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes, late Lord Bishop of Winchester (London: George Miller, 1629), 278. On the printing of the XCV I Ser mons, see Peter McCullough, “Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 1626–1642,” The Historical Journal 41 (June 1998): 401–24.
Zillah M. Dovey, An Elizabethan Progress: The Queen’s Journey into East Anglia, 1578 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1996), 15–16, 88–94; and Loades, Elizabeth I, 195.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 35, 47; and Carole Levin, The Reign of Elizabeth I (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 28, 34.
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© 2015 Carole Levin and Christine Stewart-Nuñez
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Strauss, P. (2015). The Virgin Queen as Nurse of the Church: Manipulating an Image of Elizabeth I in Court Sermons. In: Levin, C., Stewart-Nuñez, C. (eds) Scholars and Poets Talk about Queens. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137534903_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137534903_19
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