Elizabeth of Hardwick and epistolary negotiations : | author: Madeline Chatfield.: noblewomen and sixteenth-century English politics

This thesis analyses the ways in which English noblewomen used epistolary conventions and letter-writing to engage as agents in the political sphere of sixteenth-century England. It provides a long-term historical context to current discourses, both public and scholarly, about the place and function of women as actors in the political sphere. This thesis presents a case study of one English noblewoman, Elizabeth of Hardwick, whose life marked a gradual ascent from the landed gentry to the heights of the English aristocracy, and who remains one of Tudor England’s most prolific letter writers. Through a close reading of Elizabeth’s correspondence, this thesis will demonstrate how it was possible for noblewomen toact as political agents in sixteenth-century England while simultaneously being historically disenfranchised individuals. I argue that Elizabeth of Hardwick utilised epistolary conventions such as gendered appeals to motherhood and textual structures based on the Ciceronian tradition of public political language in letters to members of her social network to maintain powerful political connections and to exert influence upon institutional political processes.