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Essex: the cultural impact of an Elizabethan Courtier

This collection of new essays about the Earl of Essex, one of the most important figures of the Elizabethan court, resituates his life and career within the richly diverse contours of his cultural and political milieu and identifies the ways in which his biography has been interpreted during his own lifetime and since his death in 1601. Collectively, the essays examine visual and textual manifestations of Essex: poems, portraits, films; texts produced by Essex himself, including private letters, prose tracts, poems and entertainments; and the transmission and circulation of these as a means of disseminating his political views. The 10,000 word introduction prises open long-held assumptions about the earl’s life by providing a corrective to the biographical-historicist approach which has tended to view the career of Essex as a teleological narrative, culminating in his execution in 1601, and offering instead a diachronic approach to the Earl’s career, identifying crucial events such as the Irish campaign and the uprising and re-evaluating their significance and critical reception. Because of the different types of material covered and the range of expertise of the contributors, this collection achieves more than a monograph could, and it was also accompanied by a launch event in the form of a one-day symposium at Sheffield Hallam on 26/10/13 which brought together scholars who had been involved with the collection and whose research continues to engage with the issues and questions raised by their work for the volume. The sub-panel is asked to consider Connolly's work on both the introduction and the creation of the edited collection as a whole: she was key to the conception of the project, the selection of contributors, the editing of the volume and the organisation of the symposium.