Multilingualism at the Tudor Court: Henry, Elizabeth and the Love Letter Genre

This essay proposes to reappraise Elizabeth I's linguistic and rhetorical achievements by exploring the multilingual environment in which she was brought up, shifting the perspective back to the reign of Henry VIII. It thus examines the small corpus of seventeen love letters written by Henry to Elizabeth's mother Anne Boleyn, which were stolen and brought to Rome after her death, in parallel to Elizabeth's own use of foreign language in her letters to Francis, Duke of Anjou: a comparable type of writing, belonging to the genre of the familiar letter, but which, in Elizabeth's case, goes well beyond the the love note type. An analysis of the linguistic strategies employed in both sets of letters illuminates the ways in which a special identity is constructed in the use of a foreign language to express sentiment and deploy tacts of persuasion.