This collection examines the afterlives of early modern English and French rulers. Spanning five centuries of cultural memory, the volume offers case studies of how kings and queens were remembered, represented, and reincarnated in a wide range of sources, from contemporary pageants, plays, and visual art to twenty-first-century television, and from premodern fiction to manga and romance novels. With essays on well-known figures such as Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette as well as lesser-known monarchs such as Francis II of France and Mary Tudor, Queen of France, Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France brings together reflections on how rulers live on in collective memory.

Table of contents

Introduction : Remembering, Forgetting, and the Power of Memory
Paranque, Estelle

Boudicca and Elizabeth Rally Their Troops : “Two Queens Both Alike in Dignity”
Levin, Carole

Princess, Duchess, Queen : Mary Tudor As Represented in a Seventeenth-Century French Love Story
Schutte, Valerie

Virtue Betray’d : Women Writing Anne Boleyn in the Long Eighteenth Century
Russo, Stephanie

“Of Hopes Great as Himselfe” : Tudor and Stuart Legacies of Edward VI
Guyer, Benjamin M.

Chivalry, Nobility, and Romance : Richard Hurd and the Ideal Elizabethan Past
Santvoort, Jurriaan

Charles IX of France or the Anti-King : His Legacy in Plays and Chronicles in Seventeenth- and Long Eighteenth-Century France
Paranque, Estelle

Remembering—and Forgetting—Regicide : The Commemoration of the 30th of January, 1649–1660
Peck, Imogen

Henrietta Maria, “Queen of Tears” ? : Picturing and Performing the Cavalier Queen
Betts, Sarah

Romantic Recreations : Remembering Stuart Monarchy in Nineteenth-Century Fancy Dress Entertainments
Wild, Benjamin L.

She-Wolf or Feminist Heroine ? Representations of Margaret of Anjou in Modern History and Literature
Dudley, Imogene

Reincarnating the Forgotten Francis II : From Puerile Pubescent to Heroic Heartthrob
Peebles, Kelly D.

Daenerys Targaryen as Queen Elizabeth I’s Spiritual Daughter
Paranque, Estelle

50 Shades of Elizabeth ; or, “Doing History” in Pop Fiction
Mackay, Elizabeth Ann

Conniving Queen, Frivolous Wife, or Romantic Heroine ? The Afterlife of Queen Henrietta Maria
Dunn-Hensley, Susan

“Let them eat cake, she says” : Assessing Marie-Antoinette’s Image
Herber, Courtney

Estelle Paranque is Lecturer in Early Modern History at New College of the Humanities and an Honorary Research Fellow within the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of Elizabeth I of England through Valois Eyes : Power, Representation, and Diplomacy in the Reign of the Queen, 1558–1588 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).