"More Than a Woman": Elizabeth I's Self-Representation as an Exceptional Woman in "The Golden Speech"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, John Knox vehemently argues against women’s capacity to rule because of what he believes to be their natural inferiority to men. However, he also allows for the possibility of outstanding women who have been elevated by God, through no merit of their own, as an exception to their otherwise weak sex. Queen Elizabeth I’s rhetorical strategy, in the "Golden Speech" and elsewhere, relies heavily on this construct of the exceptional woman as a means of legitimizing her power within a patriarchal system of governance. Elizabeth presents herself as an exceptional woman by justifying her authority through God, negating her learned eloquence in the very act of expressing herself, and maintaining the inferiority of women in order to foreground herself as uniquely powerful. She furthers her exceptionality by claiming a special access to masculine modes of authority, constructing an authority that is inseparable from herself and thus not available to women generally. Reading Elizabeth through this strategy undermines the idea that simply having women in positions of power abolishes patriarchal systems of governance, and shows that the power of patriarchy to persist relies, in part, on its capacity to implicate women in their own subjugation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".