Foreign Literatures Departmental Seminar
The female monarchical body occupied a central place in the political imagination of sixteenth-century England. During the reign of Elizabeth I, debates over the Queen’s authority and body-related choices (including marriage, reproduction, and succession) repeatedly surfaced across a range of literary and political genres, reflecting widespread national anxiety. These debates exposed tensions between the Queen’s female body and her political body, which Elizabeth negotiated rhetorically in her speeches, letters, and published prayers. This talk addresses the various political, physical, and metaphysical “body conflicts” in the writings of Elizabeth and her circle, focusing on parliamentary petitions and speeches. It argues that, as political forces
sought to nationalize and instrumentalize the Queen’s body for the perceived good of the realm, Elizabeth increasingly advanced an intangible, ungendered conception of sovereignty that liberated her from the physical limitations of her body and conflated it with the body of her kingdom. In practice, this meant emphasizing her virtues as a worthy ruler of England, regardless of gender.
Dr. Yafit Shachar specializes in early modern English literature and culture. She completed her PhD in the School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University, writing her dissertation on body conflicts in the political writings of Queen Elizabeth I. During her doctoral studies, she was a Fox International Fellow at Yale University (2021-22) and a visiting doctoral student at the University of Oxford (2023-24).
Dr. Shachar is currently a teaching fellow at Tel Aviv University’s International Liberal Arts Program and a Kreitman Postdoctoral Fellow at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2025-26). At BGU, she examines the diverse uses of the Hebrew Bible in sixteenth-century political rhetoric under the supervision of Professor Chanita Goodblatt. Her work has appeared in venues such as Studies in Philology and Women’s Studies, as well as in edited collections. In 2026-27, she will be a Katz Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn).
