Elizabeth’s Italian rhetoric : the Maximilian letters

Elizabeth I's linguistic skills were never in doubt during her lifetime, and she put them to excellent use when she became Queen. Although she never left England, throughout her reign she wrote extensively to correspondents abroad, and her extant foreign correspondence ranges from the ceremonial to the religiously committed to the intimate and emotionally vulnerable. The relationships Elizabeth forged through these texts were of central importance to the diplomacy and politics of the period. This volume presents the findings of a major international research project on the Queen's correspondence, and includes newly edited texts and translations of nine of Elizabeth's holograph letters in foreign languages.