Renaissance Queens and Foucauldian Carcerality (original) (raw)

This essay examines the figuring of images and experiences of imprisonment in the public and private writings and speeches of three women — Marguerite de Navarre, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I — and a man, Sir Philip Sidney, writing to an explicitly feminised agenda. It explores the ways in which the differing belief systems of Protestantism and Catholicism inflected the meanings constructed for carcerality, and the extent to which it could be perceived as an instrument of reform rather than merely detention.