ABSTRACT
The Henry Sidney and Dudley pedigree rolls, those images that would have been familiar to her as part of her family culture and history, were early lessons, however, not simply in early modern elite genealogy's compulsory patrilinearity, but in familial genealogy's flexibility. Sidney's Defence of Leicester contains a highly conflicted representation of woman's power over lineage, descent, and genealogical continuity. Sidney struggles with the reality of his claims for nobility and influence as grounded in his maternal Dudley line, just as Leicester's own genealogical honour relies on his maternal line as well. Thomas Sidney's birth is situated between two events in the history of salvation that were often linked in providential and typological terms, since the Annunciation was seen as the earlier type or promise fulfilled in its antitype, the Resurrection: the birth of Christ in the flesh prefiguring his rebirth through his rising from the dead.
