Associate Professor of British & Irish Literary Studies, Carmen Nocentelli recently published an essay titled, “Rereading Elizabeth I as Europa” in PMLA , Volume 138 , Issue 2 , pp. 321 – 342. Read the essay here: https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000172
Abstract from PMLA: Albeit widely cited, the 1598 engraving known as Elizabeth I as Europa is something of a mystery: little to nothing is known of its authorship or of the circumstances of its production and circulation. Tracing the print’s origins to one of Europe’s earliest news periodicals, I argue that Elizabeth I as Europa is not about Elizabeth but about Europa—which is to say, about the construction of an early modern public that could understand itself as European. The print participated in this construction in two interrelated ways: as an intervention in Europa Regina cartography, it thematized Europe as a shared (if highly contested) space of discourse that could cut across national, linguistic, and confessional differences; as a piece of transnational reportage meant for broadscale circulation, it helped conjure up the public on which that space of discourse depended.
