Leadership and Elizabethan Culture

Bringing together contributions from political, cultural, and literary historians, Leadership and Elizabethan Culture identifies distinctive problems confronting early modern English government during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

This diverse group of contributors examines local elites and church leadership, explores the queen, her councillors, as well as her struggles with Mary Stuart and Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, raises questions about Elizabeth's leadership, and the advice she received as well as the advice she rejected.

Selected, influential works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Sidney, and Bacon are put in their Elizabethan and contemporary critical contexts, rounding off the study of Elizabethan culture and projecting forward to the images of leadership that form a conspicuous part of the Elizabethan legacy.

Peter Iver Kaufman is Charles Matthews and Virginia Brinkley Modlin Professor of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond, USA, and Professor Emeritus of History and Religious Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. He has published books on Tudor culture as well as on religion and politics in late antiquity. His latest, Incorrectly Political: Augustine and Thomas More, was published in 2007, while his Religion Around Shakespeare will be published next year in the series he edits for Pennsylvania State University Press. He is also editor-in-chief of the on-line journal Religions.