The Image of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Spain ed. by Eduardo Olid Guerrero, and Esther Fernández

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Image of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Spain ed. by Eduardo Olid Guerrero, and Esther Fernández Noelia Cirnigliaro Olid Guerrero, Eduardo, and Esther Fernández, eds. The Image of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Spain. Foreword by Susan Doran. U of Nebraska P, 2019. 409 pp. The collection of essays edited by Eduardo Olid Guerrero and Esther Fernández entitled The Image of Elizabeth I in Early Modern Spain begins with a striking question posed by Susan Doran in her forward to the book: "Who would think there was any more to say about the image of Queen Elizabeth I? Over the past thirty years or more, historians and literary scholars from Britain and America, like myself, have re-examined her portraits, deconstructed her writings and speeches, and analyzed contemporary works of praise and criticism to reveal a more nuanced image than that originally presented by the three heavyweights, Elkin Calhoun Wilson, Roy Strong and Frances Yates" (xi). Happily, there is a however that precedes the second paragraph of the forward. Doran acknowledges that most scholarship on the relations between Spain and Britain in the Early Modern period has been Anglocentric, focusing mainly on the perspectives that contextualize Elizabeth I's image in the realm of Anglo-Saxon cultural and historical archives, even those works dealing with the reception of the Queen's image outside the island. Esther Fernández and Eduardo Olid Guerrero, the editors of this beautifully illustrated volume, seem to have rightly identified such slant in the scholarship and, together with nine other contributors, are set to remediate it. Put simply, the introduction by Olid Guerrero and the other ten essays (including one by his co-editor Fernández) strive to diversify the scholarship around Elizabeth Tudor, offering a series of answers to three key questions: first, how the Elizabethan political and iconographic strategies were seen from the viewpoint of the Spanish Monarchy, its colonies, and its allies; second, how influential the presence of Spain was in Elizabeth I's policies and in the representation of her public [End Page 309] image; and finally, in which ways had or hadn't her image changed once she passed away and her legacy in Spain became a legend. In other words, and based on these central inquiries, the research perspectives and methodologies that the essays open up could be grouped under theories of reception and semiology; international political theories and theories of self-fashioning, and finally—although not explicitly mentioned in the book—, a Warburg-like approach to the concept of the afterlife of images that reminds us of the iconographic notion of the Pathosformel. The organization of the volume is impeccable because it offers expert scholars or the lay curious readers a handful of answers to those questions in the three parts that organize the volume. There are several premises in this collection of essays as a whole, the main one being that there are shifts and transformations in the relationship between Protestant England and Catholic Spain and their allies during and after Elizabeth's life. Regarding the transformation, Olid Guerrero and Magdalena de Pazzis Pi Corrales pinpoint the principal changes and modifications (in the introduction and the opening chapter, respectively) that would lead from a status of political friendship between the nations to one of disdain, enmity, and aversion. These authors remind us of that short-lived period of grace and friendship of nations when Philip II assisted Elizabeth in 1554 as she was imprisoned for accusations of treason. And we are also reminded that, about five years later, he proposed marriage to Elizabeth soon after her half-sister and the Queen Consort of Spain, Mary Tudor, had died. These important diplomatic moves aimed at strengthening the restoration of Catholicism in England mark a period in which bilateral relationships between Tudor England and Hapsburg Spain were somewhat framed in the potential of friendship, mutual respect, and alliance. But Elizabeth's refusal to marry and, of course, England's reaffirmation of Protestantism gave rise to a negative pamphlet-driven image of Gloriana in Spanish territories, one tainted and shaped by notions of religious heresy, political unfitness, and the sheer irrationality and monstrosity of the...