During the Elizabethan era, beliefs about women's susceptibility to emotion intersected with debates about monarchical power and equity in law to make the concept of mercy a particularly complex one. Contemporary writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and others expounded on mercy in many of their works, exploring the sources and outcomes of clemency. Through a fresh reading of such depictions, author Mary Villeponteaux shows that the concept of mercy was a contested one, both conceptually and in practice, under Elizabeth I, and that its cultural representation was directly shaped by tensions surrounding the exercise of judgment by a woman on the throne.
