This article presents the theme of the special edition, provides a case study, and sets out the ways in which the contributions consider how notions of privacy and the private emerged, influenced, or existed within and around the institution of monarchy. One of the key ways to tackle privacy is to investigate the idea of 'access' and 'accessibility', which is an underlying theme throughout the contributions of this special edition. Each contributor informs the phenomena of privacy, and thus privacy studies, through their research. These articles seek to understand the ways in which sexuality, hospitality, and diplomacy are shaped by notions of privacy and the private, as a means of contextualising and understanding the nuances of gender, power, and the interrelations of rulership.
The present article explores how women of power engaged in diplomatic efforts via forms of epistolary privacy by analysing private letters between Elizabeth I and Anna of Saxony in the late 1570s and early 1580s. Through a close examination of how their exchanges moved from very public matters to more personal requests, the authors show how early modern notions of privacy offered strategic communication prompts that could be used effectively by women in political negotiations. The intersection between these zones of privacy with the very public matters being addressed in Elizabeth's and Anna's epistolary exchange makes explicit how noble women could develop their own private politics, becoming active agents of diplomacy even in periods of extreme religious and political turmoil through personal connections within female noble circles.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.