ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that the questions of gender certainly merit a closer look, and that it will not do to exclude women from processes involved in the emergence of national identity. It argues that, in the case of late sixteenth-century England, the emergence was crucially propelled by anxieties about the relation of gender and power that had much to do with the intrusion of a woman into the male domain of national politics, that is, with the rule of Queen Elizabeth I. National identity as a particularly masculine form of self-conception emerges precisely as a reaction to the anomaly of female power with which Elizabeth's reign confronted her subjects and as an attempt to contain it. The chapter explores that the Elizabethan appropriation of Italian Petrarchism contains a national dimension. The feminization of England propagated by the cult of Elizabeth made it possible to imbue the Petrarchan convention of love towards an adored lady with patriotic reverberations.
