Sir Philip Sidney and the politics of Protestant counsel

Although recent scholarship has begun to explore Sidney's literary works as political commentary, it has largely ignored the influence on his writings of Calvinism and the politics of the Reformed Protestant movement in Europe. The purposes of this dissertation are threefold: to redefine Sidney's cultural milieu in European, rather than, as hitherto, simply domestic terms; to demonstrate the relationship between his work and the European Protestant texts of the period; to illustrate how his works may be read as Calvinist counsel texts.;Chapter one explores the historical context of Sidney's "Discourse on Irish Affairs," and argues that the queen's harsh and ungenerous treatment of his father in Ireland moved Philip Sidney toward a Reformed Protestant definition of service and counsel.;Chapter two suggests that the marriage negotiations of Elizabeth and the Duke of Alencon enact the conflict between Calvinist and monarchal ideas of counsel, between the more reformist Protestants of the Privy Council and the queen. As an alternative to the censored voice of the Council, Sidney's letter to Elizabeth, "Touching Her Marriage with Monsieur," articulates the nature of that conflict.;Chapter three argues that, in his literary works, Sidney capitalizes on the generic privileges of romance and epic to present, indirectly, the political arguments and positions of European Protestant texts of the period. Reading the Arcadia alongside the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, I argue that both are concerned with governance, religious duty and counsel.;Chapter four also situates Sidney's literary works within European Protestant discourse. It considers the rhetorical strategies of Astrophil and Stella and the Psalms and explores how the two poetic genres afford Sidney different opportunities to introduce his political and religious agenda.;In summary, my dissertation considers Sidney's works as an expression of a Calvinist concern to reformulate the social order. Read thus, the works reveal something of the territory where individuals exert influence on government policy even as they themselves are shaped by contemporary ideologies.