ABSTRACT
The most public political debate about women during the Renaissance was the legal and constitutional debate about women monarchs. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, John Aylmer published one of the major defences of woman’s ability to rule An harborow for faithful and true subjects (1559) (pp. 140-2), defending a woman’s equal right to inherit, and therefore, in certain cases, to inherit the rule of a kingdom. Although he immediately qualified this right by arguing that such cases are exceptional elections by God, he initiates a public political discourse in which women (or one woman) are seen to have political and legal rights. Nevertheless, he does so by reinstating and reasserting the dichotomy of the ordinary weak woman (‘feeble in body’ and politically subject to a husband) and the extraordinary woman, fit for magistracy through the word of God. The legal precedent for the authority of a woman monarch was the parliamentary statute enacted at the beginning of Mary’s reign, which states: ‘that what and whensoever statute or law doth limit and appoint that the king of this realm may or shall…do anything as king… the same the queen…may by the same authority and power likewise…do.1 This statute effectively rendered a queen masculine for the purposes of her public and princely function. The indirect precedent for this usage and interpretation was the well-established concept of the monarch’s ‘two bodies’, the individual mortal one and the political immortal one.2 The concept of a woman’s weak physical nature is particularly effective for such a theory: it can acknowledge both her weakness and the hidden purpose of God’s will for the continuity of the public, political body.
