Female Monarch Research Articles

Josephus’s Ambivalent Attitude towards Women and Power

Scholars have long been bewildered by Josephus’s contradictory accounts of the reign of Queen Alexandra (76–67 B. C. E.), the only independent female Hasmonean ruler. While portraying her as a wise, skillful, and beloved ruler, Josephus also harshly criticizes her reign, holding her responsible for the downfall of Judea. A critical feminist historiographic approach to philological and textual analyses of Alexandra’s portrayal in Judean War and Judean Antiquities allows us to resolve this tension, by situating the case of Queen Alexandra within the context of Jewish history, Greco-Roman history, and gender discourse. Additional factors impacting upon Josephus’s differing evaluations of Queen Alexandra in War and Antiquities include cultural conditions, in particular the different attitudes of Roman and Hellenistic society toward women in power, and the challenge presented to traditional male political structures by the transfer of power to a female monarch. This finding may also contribute to a better understanding of portrayals of other leading women in antiquity.

“I’ll Find a Day to Massacre Them All”: Tamora in Titus Andronicus and Catherine de Médicis

Queen of the Goths, Empress of Rome, Machiavellian and monstrous monarch: what literary, historical, or contemporary counterparts lurk behind Shakespeare's Tamora in Titus Andronicus? Critics have associated Tamora with the many classical tyrants or vengeful women the play invokes, including Semiramis and Hecuba; with Shakespeare's current monarch, Elizabeth I, whose subjects were often threatened by the anomaly of a woman on the throne; or with the widespread cultural unease about female unruliness that marked the sixteenth century. (1) While Shakespeare had examples of transgressive female power aplenty to draw upon--whether fictive or factual--this essay argues for a contemporary female monarch as prototype for Tamora: Catherine de Medicis, who ruled as queen consort, queen regent, and queen mother of France from 1547 to 1589 and whose legendary status as archetypal wicked queen had already gathered currency in her own life time. This argument not propose a political allegory or a unidirectional correspondence of the old historicist variety, for Shakespeare was seldom that explicit or reductive. But the resemblances between Catherine's reputed monstrosity and Shakespeare's articulation of the wicked queen in Titus--for he would go on to create other variations in later plays--are striking, and suggest another example of the intertextual transmission so central to his creative process. Shakespeare, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it, does not conceal his indebtedness to literary sources, nor he conceal the input of collective beliefs, cultural practices, and early modern foundational narratives, even if the latter influences are more challenging to trace. (2) In this case, I argue that Shakespeare's Tamora powerfully evokes the Catherine de Medicis understood by popular and political discourse in late Elizabethan England as well as the Catherine de Medicis represented in two pre-texts or co-texts: Anne Dowriche's narrative poem, The French History, and Christopher Marlowe's play, The Massacre at Paris. Catherine was born in 1519 into the powerful Medicis family of Italy but came to France in 1533 as a pawn in a politically arranged marriage. When she was just fourteen, she married the Duke of Orleans, who became King Henri II of France in 1547. After Henri's untimely death in a jousting accident, Catherine ruled as queen mother and regent during the reigns of her sons Francois II (1559-60), Charles IX (1560-74), and finally Henri III (1574-89). In the last years of his reign, Henri III wrested some of the political control away from Catherine, but she nonetheless remained a dynamic force at court, and was arguably the most powerful woman in Europe for the latter half of the sixteenth century. (3) Catherine died in January of 1589; Dowriche's poem was printed later that year. Scholars date the composition of Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris between 1589 and January of 1593, its first recorded performance, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus anywhere from 1589 to January of 1594, when it was first performed. That these three works were written in such close proximity points to an intriguing intertextual relationship; that they were published so soon after Catherine's death suggests that her long and influential role in the politics of nearby France kept her in the forefront of English consciousness. Even more present than the collective perception of Catherine as a domineering matriarch and monarch was the most notorious event that occurred on her watch: the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in August of 1572. The massacre took place on the occasion of the wedding festivities for Catherine's daughter, Marguerite de Valois, and Henri de Navarre, the next in line to the French throne after Catherine's sons, the Dukes of Anjou and Alencon. In marrying the Catholic Marguerite to the Protestant Navarre, Catherine hoped to end years of devastating religious conflict through a symbolic union of the two factions. …

Sex ratios and Ophryocystis elektroscirrha infection levels of Danaus plexippus during spring migration through Oklahoma, USA

AbstractMonarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus L. (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae), have a multiple brood migration in the spring as they move between their overwintering grounds and summer breeding grounds. In Oklahoma, USA, monarchs produce at least one generation in the spring, which develops and continues the northward migration, leaving Oklahoma without a breeding population during the hot summer months. Female monarchs leave the overwintering grounds prior to males, but it is not clear whether females re‐colonize areas along the migration route prior to, or at the same time as males. Male‐to‐female ratios are 1:1 at emergence, but studies have identified a male‐biased sex ratio in the field. Both males and females are susceptible to infection by the obligate protozoan parasite, Ophryocystis elektroscirrha McLaughlin & Myers (OE), which reduces flight abilities and life spans of infected individuals. We examine sex ratios during the spring migration through Oklahoma and whether sex ratios or OE infection estimates vary with capture technique (active or passive). Our data suggest populations are male‐biased during the 1st week of spring migration in Oklahoma, but shift to female‐biased by the 3rd week in both cool and warm springs. Therefore, males may leave southern areas prior to females or migrate longer distances per day. Active sampling (i.e., netting) did not bias sex compared to passive sampling (i.e., sticky traps). Significantly fewer OE‐carrying monarchs (with two or more spores) were captured via netting than by sticky traps which may be caused by sticky trap glue affecting tape sampling effectiveness, but there was no difference in the number of heavily infected individuals (more than 100 spores). Therefore, data from netted monarchs may underestimate OE infection rates within populations.

A Man’s Work Must She Do: Female Manliness in Tennyson’s Gareth and Lynette

While and woman still are incomplete, I prize that where and woman meet, Which types all Nature's male and female plan, But friend, man-woman is not woman-man. (1) This 1889 poem by Alfred Tennyson, On One who Affected an Effeminate Manner, articulates an idea about gender the complexity of which belies the verse's brevity--the best people combine the virtues associated with both genders, but those who fail to live up to the standards of their sex cannot hope to compensate by evincing the virtues of the opposite one. A manuscript version of the second line reads, best man, the and women meet (Ricks, 3:217): Tennyson's change from earth's best man to the gender-neutral soul indicates how important it was to him that women who combine masculine and feminine virtues should be just as much admired as who so. manuscript for Locksley Hall Sixty Years After puts this even more clearly: As our greatest is man-woman, so was she the woman-man (3:217-218). But a much more extensive exploration of this idea is embedded in Gareth and Lynette, the second poem in Tennyson's Idylls of the King. idyll's opening, including Gareth's declaration that Man am I grown, a man's work must I do (l. 115), seems to focus on a boy's growth into manhood. However, I argue that the text as a whole is more concerned with a woman's development of virtues that characters in the poem designate as manly, and which middle-class Victorians would have regarded similarly. Existing scholarship on Idylls has explored sexual role-reversal, but almost exclusively from the perspective of male characters assuming female qualities. In The Female King: Tennyson's Arthurian Apocalypse, Elliot L. Gilbert considers the cycle in the context of a Victorian culture in which often men and women [were unwilling] to play their traditional social and sexual roles, one that witnessed the growing assertion of female authority through the of the usual male-female roles that was occasioned by the condition of having a female monarch and a male consort; Gilbert concludes that Idylls can be read as an elaborate examination of the advantages and dangers of sexual role (emphasis mine). (2) Yet despite his sensitivity to sexual role reversal in general--as opposed simply to male appropriation of female roles--in Victorian society, Gilbert focuses his argument on King Arthur's femaleness and does not consider the maleness of any of the female characters in the cycle. Even though Gilbert asserts that the hopeful invocation of female is one of the most striking features of the cycle, he confines his study to the manifestation of that energy in a male character, as opposed to a female character playing a male role (241). character of the womanly King in Idylls is explored in great depth, but that of the manly lady is not--neither in Gilbert's essay nor elsewhere. My study aims to address this lack. My argument derives inspiration from Judith Halberstam's 1998 book Female Masculinities, which disconnects masculinity from and surveys the variety of techniques by which masculine women create and express masculine identities through the ways they dress, the ways they act, the art they produce, and so forth. (3) Although Halberstam understands masculinity primarily as styles of self-presentation rather than a set of virtues to be acquired, her understanding of male masculinities as unoriginal and thus not very entertaining performances is relevant to my analysis of Tennyson's poem, which reveals how Gareth's manliness, and in particular the way he achieves and asserts his manliness, is predictable and lacking in dramatic suspense. In recent years, scholars from various disciplines have constructed several useful theoretical frameworks for Victorian masculinities. Like Halberstam, James Eli Adams considers gender largely in terms of performance, emphasizing that masculinity always requires an audience. …

Opera, Ballet, and Political Power

Opera, Ballet, and Political Power Elizabeth Kendall Christina Ezrahi, Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia. 336pp. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-1852731588. $27.90. Inna Naroditskaya, Bewitching Russian Opera: The Tsarina from State to Stage. 416pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0195340587. $74.00. On the surface, these two books appear so far apart in subject, tone, and analytic methods as to send a reviewer on a mission across a stylistic tightrope. Bewitching Russian Opera is about Russian opera’s glorious but often overlooked beginnings in an 18th century dominated by four female monarchs, and about how opera fared in the patriarchal backlash of the 19th century. Naroditskaya employs a feminist lens when analyzing the monarchs, the centuries, and especially the operas. She studies 18th-century operas as theatrical projections of these empresses (especially Catherine II, who was a prolific opera author and producer). She treats later operas as brilliant meditations on Russia’s troubled past, in which the forgotten empresses pop up again, Naroditskaya argues, in the guise of cruel witches, rusalkas, and one ancient card sharp countess. Swans of the Kremlin examines ballet, an art form seemingly separate from opera, in a time even more severed from its immediate past, the Soviet 20th century. Even though ballet’s very nature would seem to invite a gender-based analysis (human bodies are its raw material), Ezrahi does not focus so much on gender matters or even on the dancing itself, as on the art’s till now underexamined institutional history. To situate Soviet ballet in its time, she explores the inner workings of the USSR’s two key ballet institutions, Leningrad’s Mariinskii/Kirov Theater and Moscow’s Bolshoi, mostly in the [End Page 441] 1950s and 1960s, with opening chapters about the 1920s and 1930s. Only in her final chapters does she attempt to foreground performance and the choreographic text. Yet even if the two books seem far apart in subject, they share a historicist mission. Each wants to overturn certain casually persistent—and wrong-headed—myths about the Russian lyric arts in the context of political history. Naroditskaya challenges what she believes to be the gendered notion that the origins of Russian opera lie with Russian nationalism. After the death of Catherine II, she argues, the female monarchs’ musical–theatrical contributions were suppressed in favor of an instant myth about Russian music springing fully formed in 1836 (the premiere of A Life for the Tsar) from the head of Mikhail Glinka. She calls this (quoting the historian Marina Ritzarev) the “Glinka-centric conceit.”1 Ezrahi, meanwhile, marshals key Soviet choreographic achievements of the supposedly choreography-less 1960s to disprove the “Cold War dictum” still widely believed in the West: that Soviet ballet was stuck in the past, or, in Ezrahi’s words, was “belligerently conservative, producing superlative performers who were tragically, maybe even hopelessly, trapped in a system that precluded any further development of the choreographic imagination” (5). Choreographers and performers got some of their own back, Ezrahi argues, despite, or even because of, the ideological constraints of a rigid system. But something else connects these books too: the shadow kinship of opera and ballet. Contemporary historians of both arts often forget that for much of their history the two arts were not as separate as is thought today but intertwined, sharing raw material, structures, and libretti.2 Both books, moreover, repay reading by the “other” art’s afficionados. Even if Ezrahi barely mentions opera, Swans of the Kremlin allows opera specialists to see how ballet’s early struggle for a postrevolutionary identity paralleled opera’s own (Anatolii Lunacharskii, the instigator of both struggles, plays an appropriately large role in the book).3 Bewitching Russian Opera is even more rewarding for ballet-minded readers, since its first half treats that pre-Wagnerian time when ballet and opera were still married, and Naroditskaya’s book overflows with intriguing details about opera’s greater theatrical surround, which also [End Page 442] included ballet. This ballet-critic reviewer, for instance, was fascinated to learn that Aleksandr Vsevolozhskii, father of the famous Ivan, Alexander III’s courtier who practically...

In the monarch butterfly the juvenile hormone effect upon immune response depends on the immune marker and is sex dependent

In insects, juvenile hormone (JH) decreases or has any effect upon the phenoloxidase (PO) activity, and favors or decreases the Antimicrobial Peptides (AMPs) expression. Although there is no information about the differential effect of such hormone, two possibilities are that it depends on (a) the immune marker recorded and (b) sexual differences. Here, three commonly used immune markers, Phenoloxidase (PO), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), and lytic activity, were measured 3, 6 and 24 hours after administration of methoprene (JHa, an analog of juvenile hormone) in male and female monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus). At 3 and 6 h post-JHa administration, the PO activity increased in females but it only increased at 3 h in males, whereas H2O2 levels increased only in females at 3 h. For the remaining times the JHa had a null effect on POand H2O2. On the other hand, the JHa had a null effect for lytic activity in both sexes at 3, 6 and 24 h. To our knowledge, this is the first report of a positive effect of a JHa onPOand H2O2 and suggests that this effect is sex dependent.

Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen (review)

Reviewed by: Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen Jeri L. McIntosh Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen. By John Edwards. [Yale English Monarchs Series.] (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2011. Pp. xviii, 387. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-300-11810-0.) This is a thoroughly researched biography of Mary I that gives due weight to the queen’s international situation and Spanish heritage. Mary’s international connections and later marriage alliance with Philip II of Spain made her into a cosmopolitan figure. Unlike her half-sister Elizabeth, who boasted of being “mere English,” Mary took her place on the European stage as the linchpin in the restoration of England to the rest of Catholic Christendom. It is, however, hard to identify the specific audience for this work. It is a bit technical and verbose for a popular audience while too little engaged with recent Marian scholarship to be of much use to specialists. John Edwards sees many parallels between Mary’s political career and that of her maternal grandmother, Isabel of Castile. They were blood relations, female monarchs in patriarchal states, and married to men who were kings in their own right. All this is certainly true. Yet it is hard to see how these similarities provide any insight into Mary’s situation. After all, she shared these similarities with her Scottish cousin, Mary Stuart; yet there is little to be gained by noting this. Mary did not publicly identify herself with Isabel, nor did she even bother to learn enough Spanish so she could converse with her husband in his native tongue. The one lesson that Mary appeared to have picked up from her Spanish mother, Catherine of Aragon, was to cherish her Habsburg relatives but identify her interests and future with that of England, not Spain. This biography is reminiscent of H. F. M. Prescott’s inexplicably influential Mary Tudor: The Spanish Tudor (London, 1940). Prescott described Mary as a simple housewife at heart, and Edwards concludes that such an assessment “is not wide of the mark” (p. 345). This assessment runs counter to recent scholarship noting Mary’s humanist education, complex rhetoric, and astonishing near success in restoring England to the Catholic fold. That Edwards borrows a little of Prescott’s misguided confidence is understandable. Mary resists easy assessment and the biographer’s art. As princess, she advised the imperial ambassador to burn their correspondence, suggesting she may have habitually destroyed hers. Unlike Elizabeth, Mary’s decisive [End Page 810] actions rarely match her nihilistic rhetoric. When Elizabeth declared she would rather remain single but would marry if God placed a suitable candidate before her, she followed through by remaining single but also vigorously pursuing a match with a French prince. Whereas Mary assured her subjects during the Wyatt rebellion that she would only marry after consulting the privy council, she had, in fact, already privately sworn to marry Philip regardless of the council’s views. Mary deployed the rhetoric of wifely subordination and dependence in her letters to Philip when he was away to lure him back, yet she failed to seriously pursue the one course of action that would have brought him instantly to her side—arranging his coronation as king of England. Despite Edwards’s laudable practice of varying the narrative pace so that royal ceremonies in which Mary participated unfold slowly in rich detail, Mary remains elusive as a personality. Perhaps the questioning nursery rhyme hits the mark when it asks: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary/How does your garden grow?” Although Edwards includes an exhaustive bibliography and index, his biography is no closer to answering the rhyme than Prescott was in 1940. This reader was left with the following question: How does one chronicle the lives of subjects whose actions belie their words? Jeri L. McIntosh University of Tennessee at Knoxville Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

Lord Cornbury and the Arcana Practise

In 1702 Queen Anne, the second daughter born to James II and his first wife, Anne Hyde, appointed her cousin, Lord Cornbury, governor of the Province of New York. He turned out as one of colonial New York's unique and controversial figures. This was mainly due to the fact that he kept the “arcana imperii” of his queen. He claimed that “he represented a woman and ought in all respects to represent her as faithfully as he could.” Thus he acquired the rituals and rhetoric of queenship. His power depended on the role of the female monarch, both as a symbol of harmony and dynastic stability and as a potential focus for political factionalism, disunity and discontent.

The Female Monarchy: A Rhetorical Strategy of Early Modern Rule

Queen Mary I was crowned in 1553, becoming the first reigning queen of England. In order to provide a powerful image of female rule to her people, Queen Mary invented a rhetorical strategy that reflected her society's oppressive gender expectations of chaste silence so that she could become a powerfully voiced ruler. Her sister and successor, Queen Elizabeth I, later mirrored Mary's strategy. England's first female monarchs created an image of female rule by employing the figures of the spouse, the mother, and the maiden, embodying conventional roles for women in Tudor society, and reclaiming them as images of power.

Gendered Sovereignty: Numismatics and Female Monarchs in Europe, 1300–1800

Coins have provided specific and concrete markers of official, legitimate political sovereignty since the time of the Roman Empire. Europe's female monarchs of the old regime, a group that has not been much studied, used numismatics in effective ways to enhance their official sovereignty. Throughout the entire period, most royal heiresses were married, and despite a persistent and widely circulated literature that preached wifely subservience, their coins (and, later, their medals) suggest their full political autonomy.

Dangerous Judgments: Elizabethan Mercy in The Faerie Queene

Despite the traditional veneration of mercy as a Christian virtue, many sixteenth-century writers caution against clemency, depicting it as a product of weak natures, such as those of women. The belief that women are passionate creatures prone to pity contributes to doubts about a woman’s ability to rule. Elizabeth I, though praised for her godlike mercy, was also accused of excessive lenity. Nevertheless Elizabeth clearly wanted to be reputed merciful and to avoid the label of “unnatural” that was often applied to cruel women. Spenser’s depiction of mercy in The Faerie Queene reflects these tensions. In Book II, mercy is described as the chief glory of Elizabeth’s reign, yet the events of this book characterize both pity and mercy as destructive. In Book V, Spenser lavishes praise on the ideal of mercy but discourages merciful actions. The Mercilla episode reflects Spenser’s understanding that, in choosing between mercy and rigor, a female monarch might be vulnerable to accusations of either womanish pity or unnatural cruelty.

Review: The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century, by Shirine Hamadeh and Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan, by Lucienne Thys-Şenocak

Shirine Hamadeh ; The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century ; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007, 368 pp., 105 illus., 8 in color, 3 maps. $60, ISBN 0295986670 Lucienne Thys-SSenocak ; Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan ; Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2007, 346 pp., 104 b/w illus. $124.95, ISBN 0754633101 A major world capital since the fourth century, Istanbul has an enormously rich and complex history. Understanding its story is complicated by a modern historiography and periodization that are heavily inflected by modern political perspectives. Architectural historians of the early- to mid-Turkish Republican period, for example, glorified the apogee of Ottoman power, the fifteenth century, as the classical moment of Ottoman architecture, celebrating an era that could nourish the pride of the nascent nation-state. Initially designed to denigrate post-seventeenth-century Ottoman rule as the decline out of which the Republic of Turkey would emerge, phoenix-like, in 1923, this perspective has been since revised by scholars of history and architectural history, who have revealed the nineteenth century to be an era of dynamic modernization. Still, this second emphasis left the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries somewhat overlooked, perceived as a continuation of the classical legacy and as the reflection of the creeping onslaught of Westernization. Lucienne Thys-Senocak's Ottoman Women Builders: The Architectural Patronage of Hadice Turhan Sultan and Shirine Hamadeh's The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century examine the architectural legacy of the Ottoman imperial family, adding nuance and critical awareness to the study of the subtle shifts that took place in Ottoman society and their reflection in the urban forms created between the often dichotomized classical and the modern periods. Ottoman Women Builders focuses on the patronage of the Hadice Turhan Sultan (1628?––1687), who was given the opportunity——unprecedented for a woman——to rule the Ottoman state when her son, Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648––87), ascended to the throne at the age of six. As Thys-Senocak astutely points out, while unique within the empire, her rise took place at an auspicious moment for female monarchs across Europe. Using the comparative framework provided by this historical conjuncture, Thys-Senocak examines how architecture was used for …

Royal Obligation and the "Uncontrolled Female" in Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés

In her adaptation of the medieval romance that served as the source material for her comedia , Ana Caro preserved in her title the name of the original titular hero Partinuplés, yet she chose to make the protagonist of her work Rosaura, empress of Constantinople. This crucial change allows her to present the perspective of a female character forced to operate as a monarch within the expectations of a patriarchal system of government. The circumstances are analogous to Caro herself working within the male-established customs and expectations of comedia authorship. In the play, one issue in particular serves as the focus and source of all the conflict: Rosaura must contend with the demand of her subjects that she marry and produce an heir. While the matter of succession must be in some way addressed by all monarchs, it is a problematic one for a female monarch if there is a suspicion that the marriage is a means of containing and controlling her. Rosaura's situation is further complicated by the presence of a prophecy in the plot that foretells disaster to herself and her kingdom should she marry. This essay specifically examines the methods and character of Caro's heroine in dealing with these circumstances. In her absolute dedication to fulfilling her duty and obligations, she serves as an exemplum for Partinuplés. In addition, she insists on the right of consent in the marriage and thereby hopes to avoid the disaster of the prophecy, illustrating a common concern for female characters of the comedia , the desire to subvert arranged marriages. This essay further contextualizes the question of female rule and royal marriage in light of the literary model of Lope de Vega's La reina Juana de Nápoles and the historical models of Elizabeth I of England and Isabel of Castile.

The Rhetoric of Resistance and Obedience Concerning the Rule of a Protestant Female Monarch

The Rhetoric of Resistance and Obedience Concerning the Rule of a Protestant Female Monarch

Are female monarch butterflies declining in eastern North America? Evidence of a 30-year change in sex ratios at Mexican overwintering sites

Every autumn the entire eastern North American population of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) undergoes a spectacular migration to overwintering sites in the mountains of central Mexico, where they form massive clusters and can number in the millions. Since their discovery, these sites have been extensively studied, and in many of these studies, monarchs were captured and sexes recorded. In a recent effort to compile the sex ratio data from these published records, a surprising trend was found, which appears to show a gradual decline in proportion of females over time. Sex ratio data from 14 collections of monarchs, all spanning 30 years and totaling 69 113 individuals, showed a significant negative correlation between proportion of females and year (r = -0.69, p = 0.007). Between 1976 and 1985, 53 per cent of overwintering monarchs were female, whereas in the last decade, 43 per cent were female. The relationship was significant with and without weighting the analyses by sampling effort. Moreover, analysis of a recent three-year dataset of sex ratios revealed no variation among nine separate colonies, so differences in sampling location did not influence the trend. Additional evidence from autumn migration collections appears to confirm that proportions of females are declining, and also suggests the sex ratio is shifting on breeding grounds. While breeding monarchs face a number of threats, one possibility is an increase in prevalence of the protozoan parasite, Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, which recent evidence shows affects females more so than males. Further study will be needed to determine the exact cause of this trend, but for now it should be monitored closely.

Monarch Menace

Parasites are known to harm their hosts, although from an evolutionary perspective it is not intuitively obvious why an organism that depends on another for its survival and transmission would risk killing its partner. Virulence may be an unavoidable outcome of a parasite using host resources to replicate, which causes damage and provokes costly immune responses; parasites would thus be expected to limit their replication to a submaximal level. To test this hypothesis, de Roode et al. collected data on the migratory North American monarch butterfly and a spore-forming protozoan parasite. As expected, greater parasite replication and greater spore loads reduced the probability of a butterfly emerging successfully from a chrysalis and also reduced the subsequent mating success and life span of female butterflies. The tradeoff was that female monarchs with the lowest parasite loads transferred spores to only 20% of their eggs, even though the fecundity of the parasitized butterflies was unaltered by spore load. Significant differences in virulence were observed between eastern (less tolerant of virulence) and western monarchs. Because eastern migration is 10 times longer, butterflies carrying highly virulent genotypes of parasite could die of the effects of parasitism en route. — CA

Sex differences in immune defenses and response to parasitism in monarch butterflies

Host susceptibility and patterns of infection are predicted to differ between males and females due to sex-based tradeoffs between the demands of reproduction and costly immune defenses. In this study, we examined immune defenses and the response to experimental infection by a protozoan parasite, Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, in male and female monarch butterflies, Danaus plexippus. We quantified two measures of immunity in late instar larvae: the concentration of circulating hemocytes and mid-gut phenoloxidase activity, and also quantified final parasite loads, body size, longevity, and wing melanism of adult butterflies. Results showed that females had greater average hemocyte counts than males in the absence of infection; males, but not females, showed an increased concentration of hemocytes in the presence of infection. However, higher hemocyte concentrations in larvae were not significantly correlated with lower adult parasite loads, and mid-gut phenoloxidase activity was not significantly associated with hemocyte counts or parasite treatments. Among unparasitized females, greater hemocyte concentrations were costly in terms of reduced body size, but for parasite-treated females, hemocyte concentrations and body size were positively associated. Across all monarchs, unparasitized butterflies showed greater wing melanism (darker forewings) than parasitized monarchs. Overall, this study provides support for differential costs of immune defenses in male and female monarch butterflies, and a negative association between parasite infection and monarch wing melanism.

Women's Kingdoms: Female Monarchs by Two Women Dramatists of Seventeenth-Century Spain and France

Studies of female rulers as they are depicted on the seventeenth-century stage are certainly not unknown among scholars, yet scant attention has been paid to women rulers as portrayed by women dramatists. Thus, criticism in this area may be too embryonic to speak of a female aesthetic in Western European theatre, but an analysis of two plays by two women dramatists will illuminate how Spanish female playwrights may have informed the work of their counterparts north of the Pyrenees. This article centers on Ana Caro Mallén de Soto's El Conde Partinuplés (1630-1640) and Catherine Bernard's Laodamie reine d'Épire (1689), showing how each female ruler's marital status is inextricably intertwined with her political and physical survival. Both monarchs must face the demands of their citizens, the paternal pressure of absent fathers, and the right to question the absolute authority of an unmarried female ruler. While taking charge of the courting process, the women redefine the parameters of heroism and nobility. (TPF)

‘Particular Thanks and Obligations’: The Communications Made by Women to the Society of Antiquaries between 1776 and 1837, and their Significance

This paper brings together the evidence bearing on the relationship between the Society of Antiquaries and the women who contributed to it during a significant period when archaeology, through the work of such men as Samuel Lysons and Richard Colt Hoare, was beginning to emerge as a distinct field with its own conceptual and technical systems. It takes its departure from the first substantial appearance by a woman in the Society's publications in 1776, and continues until the accession of a female monarch, Victoria, in 1837, a period of just over sixty years. It explores what women did and what reception they received and assesses the significance of this within the wider processes of the development of an understanding of the past and the shaping of gender relationships through the medium of material culture, in a period that saw fundamental changes in many areas of intellectual and social life, including levels of material consumption and the sentiments surrounding consumerism.

The masculine image of a great power

This essay will use visual representations to illuminate the process whereby seventeenth‐century Sweden became a great European power. During the seventeenth century, a new technology of visual representation had provided European leaders with the illusionist tricks so essential to image‐making. Throughout Europe, political imagery and propaganda assumed important roles in politics. In the Thirty Years War, Sweden projected a very masculine image. Visual representations stressed martial values and prowess, personified by Gustavus Adolphus. As a young female monarch, his daughter Christina did not fit this image. One immediate change during her reign was that the queen represented Sweden's political power, while the martial image was personified by the field marshals. In the late seventeenth century, during the absolutist era, the field marshals maintained their position in the visual representations of Sweden, then, however, in their role as servants to the king. During her reign, the representations of power also underwent several lasting changes. Christina was the first in the line of Swedish monarchs portrayed in her personal image, as a woman at leisure. Another important change was that royal imagery in her reign used visual representations of half‐real, half‐allegorical female figures, which prepared the way for a female allegory, Suecia, personifying Sweden from the era of royal absolutism in the 1680s.