The Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance (SSWR) and The Center for the Study of Women and Society (CSWS), are pleased to present Nadine Akkerman: “Elizabeth Stuart: Queen of Hearts” on Thursday, November 17th from 6:00 – 7:30 PM EDT on Zoom. 

 

Akkerman will speak about her recent biography (2021) of Elizabeth, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Hearts (2021). Elizabeth (1596-1662), the only daughter of James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, was married to Frederick, the Elector Palatine, in 1613. His principality, the Palatinate, made him the first elector of the Holy Roman Empire. She was Queen of Bohemia for only twelve months. Frederick, offered the crown by its Protestant nobles, accepted it. His acceptance initiated the Thirty Years War, the pan-European conflict that lasted from 1618 to 1648 and left them stateless when Spain occupied the Palatinate. Frederick died in 1632, leaving Elizabeth a widow with eleven surviving children. Through her, the Stuart succession was maintained in England: her grandson became George I in 1715.

 

Nadine Akkerman is Reader in Early Modern English Literature at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. She has edited two volumes of the correspondence of Elizabeth of Bohemia (2011, 2015), with a third and final volume to come. She has also written Invisible Agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (2018).

 

 

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