Gendering sovereignty: Marriage and international relations in Elizabethan times

In this study, I show how the gendered construction of sovereignty in the Elizabethan period helped to make marriage dangerous for female rulers. In a society with firmly held convictions about a husband's divinely ordained dominion over his wife, marriage threatened to diminish a queen's sovereignty. Anticipatory fears about the marriages of England's first two queens, Mary and Elizabeth, had a more general impact, however; they contributed to the elaboration of constitutional doctrines and metaphors that further distanced sovereignty from ruler. Specifically, the need to distinguish the King's 'body politic' from his 'body natural' became acute when a female body assumed the royal office and began considering matrimony. This makes gender and marriage more fundamental to sovereignty than modern prejudices have hitherto allowed.