The Cult of Elizabeth - Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (Paperback, New ed of 2 Revised ed)

No other woman in world history has been of such complusive interest as Elizabeth Tudor. While the rest of sixteen-century Europe was subject to the bloodshed of religious war, Tudor peace brought England its great flowering of the arts. Central to that flowering was the enigmatic legend of the Queen herself, a myth deliberately created and sustained over four decades by public spectacle and courtly chivalry, by private sonnet and official oration - the arts moving in concert in homage to an earthly deity. In this fascinating and lavishly illustrated book, the fruit of nearly twenty years of research, Roy Strong fuses history, politics, religion, literature and the visual arts into a revelation of what actually constitued the Elizabethan image. The illustrations, through choice of telling detail and illuminating juxtaposition, devlop further the iconographic exploration of the Elizabethan era.