Reimagining Elizabeth I and Mary queen of Scots: women’s historiography and domestic identities, c. 1750–1800

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores eighteenth-century elite and middling women’s representations of Elizabeth I and Mary queen of Scots through manuscript-making and collecting as the means to confirm or critique their own social and domestic relationships. Scrutinising such practices, this article unpacks women’s modes of engagement in British history and the opportunities for creative reimaginings of the gendered, moral, and national identities these posed. It asserts that, in representing the combative tension between the historical figures of Elizabeth I and Mary queen of Scots, eighteenth-century women turned instead to models of collaboration to create and record their own histories, reflecting not only the lives of earlier women, but their own domestic and social situations.