Were Renaissance women merely passive and voiceless subjects in the cultures of portraiture through which they were represented? Did they have the opportunity to challenge the prevailing visual tropes that reproduced gender stereotypes? Did they create iconographical programmes for their own social and political ends?

This collection of interdisciplinary essays examines the representation of women at the intersection between portraiture, literature, drama, heritage and material culture in Renaissance Britain. It explores how power, politics and patronage manifested across text, cultural inscription and 'portraiture' – defined in its broadest sense as a cultural artefact expressive of the female image and identity. Contributors cover (self-)portraits, miniatures, engravings, sculptures, embroideries, murals, emblems, illuminated manuscripts, jewellery, coins, curated collections, theatrical props, calligraphy and other decorative and architectural features.

Bringing together art historians, curators, heritage specialists and scholars of early modern history and literature, this volume situates women as the active subjects and creators of 'cultures of portraiture'. It reveals how female power was negotiated through the royal icon; how women used patronage, pedagogy and encryption to forge female networks and navigate the dangerous worlds of religious and courtly factionalism; and how art, drama and literature reflected anxieties around women's creative agency. It demonstrates that these practices were not purely localised, but that women's portraiture connected England – conceptually, materially and ideologically – to Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Spain, Rome, the Netherlands, Africa, Persia and the Islamic world; that women employed an 'activist intermediality' to re-define their 'portraits' as tools for public identity-building, political commentary, social disruption and cross-national dialogue.

Yasmin Arshad is a former Honorary Research Fellow at UCL, from where she was awarded a PhD in English and an MA in Shakespeare in History. She is author of Imagining Cleopatra: Performing Gender and Power in Early Modern England (2019), and co-editor, with Chris Laoutaris, of Women and Cultures of Portraiture in the British Literary Renaissance (2026). She has published articles in the British Art Journal and in Early Modern Theatre and mounted a production of Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra, the first such staging of the play in four-hundred years.

Chris Laoutaris is Associate Professor at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. He is the author of Shakespeare's Book: The Intertwined Lives Behind the First Folio, Shakespeare and the Countess: The Battle that Gave Birth to the Globe, Bleed and See, and co-editor of Anne-thology: Poems Re-Presenting Anne Shakespeare. He is also a Fellow of the English Association, Higher Education Academy, Royal Society of Arts, and Royal Historical Society.