Sample Solution

It is firstly necessary to understand why resistance, as a concept, is so necessary to Elizabeth’s writings. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the religious etymology of ‘resistance’. For example, in the Bible, resisting temptations and facing difficulties are presented as virtuous, as the chapter of James states, ‘Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial’. However, in Early Modern England ‘resistance’ can be viewed from a different angle. To ‘resist’ temptation would be virtuous of a woman, but a resistance of the patriarchal norms established by a privileged-male system would be an outrage:

‘We must make a conscious effort to understand the thinking of and about women in a period when women (as a whole) were forced by political and familial circumstances into life-styles over which they exerted no control.’

Indeed, resistance against an established system was neither easy, nor advisable for a respectable reputation in a turbulent court scene. This was not merely a sociological construct – the Puritan teachings of the Church was the religious backing necessary for the demeaning of women . As John Knox, the founder of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland claimed, ‘for the man is to heade the woman […] as Christ is the heade of the churche, so is man of the woman’. This biblically established hierarchy epitomises the renaissance attitude to a woman’s social positioning.
The main methods of resistance in Elizabeth’s early epigrams are lit