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Linda Shenk
Assistant Professor
Office/Office Hours
- office: 233 Ross
- office hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:30-2:00P, online Mondays 12:00-1:00P, and by appointment
- office phone: (515) 294-8367
- email: shenk@iastate.edu
Interests
- Elizabethan court poetry
- Queen Elizabeth I as a learned queen
- Shakespeare and performance
- Environmental literature (particularly knowledge of local place and the representation of the frontier)
Current book-project
Elizabeth I, Learned Queen is the first book-length study to examine Queen Elizabeth I in the highly political role of learned prince. Although scholars have long praised Elizabeth as an educated monarch, they have not considered her cultivation of a learned persona as a sustained strategy of royal image-making—a tactic that Elizabeth invoked to assert sovereignty in times of political, often international, crisis. As an interdisciplinary project, Elizabeth I, Learned Queen situates the queen’s learning within nesting and ever-larger contexts—first Elizabeth’s own strategies of self-representation in some of her most prominent displays of erudition and then the effect of these strategies on her court and country as depicted in numerous literary texts that honor Elizabeth as a wise queen. Juxtaposing Elizabeth’s public expressions of learning with these literary representations reveals that her learned persona augmented England’s assertion of a transnational, Protestant hegemony even as it strained the queen’s relationship with the very courtiers who most sought to make this hegemony a reality. Through an interdisciplinary lens, Elizabeth I, Learned Queen opens a new avenue of thought on late Tudor sovereignty that expands current scholarly work on female rule, diplomacy, intellectual culture, pan-European Protestantism, court poetry, and court drama. It illustrates that Elizabeth’s learned persona was a primary site where the queen and her internationally ambitious courtier-statesmen not only negotiated their relationship but also leveraged the queen’s image to increase England’s diplomatic agency in the internationally expansive, yet unstable, years at the end of the sixteenth century.
Selected Publications
- “‘To Love and Be Wise’: the Earl of Essex, Humanist Court Culture, and England’s Learned Queen.” Early Modern Literary Studies. 13.2/ Special issue 16 (2007). Guest editors: Lisa Hopkins and Annaliese Connolly. http://purl.oclc.org/emls/si-16/shenwise.htm.
- “Queen Solomon: An International Elizabeth I in 1569.” Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England. Eds. Robert Bucholz and Carole Levin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming 2008.
- “Gown Before Crown: Scholarly Abjection and Academic Entertainment Under Queen Elizabeth I” Lead essay in Early Modern University Drama: Humanism, Learning and Performance. Eds. Jonathan Walker and Paul Streufert. Burlington: Ashgate, forthcoming 2008.
- "Transforming Learned Authority into Royal Supremacy: Elizabeth I's Learned Persona in her University Orations" in Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman. Eds. Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney, and Debra Barrett-Graves. Ashgate, 2003.
- "Anne Cooke Bacon" and "Mildred Cooke Cecil" in The Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance. Ed. Diana Robin. ABC-Clio.
- "John Willis." British Rhetoricians and Logicians: 1500-1660. Vol. 2. Dictionary of Literary Biography. 2003
- "Jane Howell and Subverting Shakespeare: Where Do We Draw the Line?" Shakespeare Bulletin 13.4 (1995): 33-35.
Affiliations
Degrees
- Ph.D., University of Minnesota
- M.A., University of Alaska Fairbanks
