1 Cited in Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), 236.

² Foundational texts are Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince (1516) and Juan Luis Vives’s Education of a Christian Woman (1524). On the role of Spain see B. W. Ife, Reading and Fiction in Golden-Age Spain: A Platonist Critique and some Picaresque Replies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

³ Linda Levy Peck, ‘Introduction’, in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–17 (2, 6, 10).

⁴ C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., The Works of Ben Jonson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), vol. VII: 124–5, 139.

⁵ See Sir Henry Thomas, Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920).

⁶ On Herberay’s Amadis see Luce Guillerm, Sujet de l’écriture et traduction autour de 1540 (Paris: Aux Amateurs des Livres, 1988) and Mireille Huchon, ‘Amadis, “Parfaicte idée de nostre langue françoise”’, in Nicole Cazauran and Michel Bideaux, eds., Les Amadis en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm—Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 2000), 183–200.

⁷ Jozef Ijsewijn, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies Part I: History and Diffusion of Neo-Latin Literature, 2nd edn. (Louvain: Leuven University Press and Peeters Press, 1990), 131.

⁸ Nicola Royan, ‘John Barclay’, ODNB <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1342?docPos=10> accessed 18 March 2013.

⁹ Daniel Eisenberg, Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age (Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1982), 30–1.

¹⁰ Douglas Kelly, ‘Interlace and the Cyclic Imagination’, in Carol Dover, ed., A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 55–64.

¹¹ Kelly, ‘Interlace’, 58.

¹² On romance ‘memes’ and their role in mediating medieval romance to the Renaissance see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

¹³ Anthony Munday, Amadis de Gaule, ed. Helen Moore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), book I, chapters 30–39. Subsequent citations will be given in the text, either as page or book and chapter numbers.

¹⁴ Robert Cummings, ‘Mirrors for Policy’, in Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie, eds., The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2, 1550–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 408–17 (408).

¹⁵ Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, Amadís de Gaula, ed. Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua, 2 vols., (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1991), I:220.

¹⁶ I discuss this cultural re-visioning of Amadisian geopolitics further in ‘The Eastern Mediterranean in the English Amadis Cycle, Book V’, Yearbook of English Studies, 41 (2011): 113–25.

¹⁷ Listed in John Barclay, Argenis, ed. Mark Riley and Dorothy Pritchard Huber, Bibliotheca Latinitatis Novae/Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 273, 2 vols. (Assen: Royal van Gorcum and Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), I:51–8.

¹⁸ David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 43 and 50.

¹⁹ Robert Le Grys, trans., John Barclay his Argenis (London, 1628), A2^v.

²⁰ Barclay, Argenis, I:30–1.

²¹ Citations from Argenis are from the translation by Kingsmill Long, Barclay his Argenis: or, the Loves of Poliarchus and Argenis (London, 1625) and take the form of either page or book and chapter numbers. Riley and Huber print a translation based on Long’s in their edition of the Latin original, but the level of their textual intervention makes it unsuitable for citation in this context.

²² Amelia A. Zurcher, ‘Introductory Note’ to Judith Man, An Epitome of the History of Faire Argenis and Polyarchus (1640), The Early Modern Englishwoman: Series 1, Printed Writings, 1500–1640: Part 3, volume 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), xii.

²³ Coëffeteau adds a monologue on constancy and virtue uttered by Argenis, a change that clearly facilitated Man’s rhetorical fusing of the amorous identities of Argenis and Anne Wentworth (An Epitome, p. xiii). Jacobean romance frequently invokes royal and aristocratic ‘biopolitics’; for a case study see Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Biopolitics of Romance in Mary Wroth’s Urania’, English Literary Renaissance, 31 (2001): 107–30.

²⁴ Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 180, 182, 184 and Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 150. Salzman continues the allegorical line in his discussion of Argenis in Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621 (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 75–80. In contrast, Amelia A. Zurcher’s reading of self-interest and rivalry in Argenis emphasizes political philosophy over political allegory: see her Seventeenth-Century English Romance: Allegory, Ethics and Politics (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 61–103.

²⁵ As in the introduction to the clavis in Le Grys, Argenis, 485.

²⁶ Clarke, Politics, 234.

²⁷ See Barclay, Argenis, I: 16–26 on the romance’s political and historical allusions.

²⁸ For the influence of his father’s political writings and his own classical reading (primarily Statius, Petronius, Heliodorus, and Xenophon), see Barclay, Argenis, I: 3, 6–8, 28–30.

²⁹ Brian Vickers, ed., English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 353–4 for Sidney and 299 for Spenser.

³⁰ Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, trans. Wayne Ambler (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2001), 3–5.

³¹ The Bookes of Xenophon contayning the discipline, schole and education of Cyrus the noble Kyng of Persie, trans. William Barker (London, 1552), sig. A5^r.

³² John Considine, ‘Holland, Philemon’, ODNB <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/13535> accessed 18 March 2013.

³³ On 1620s court satire see Andrew McCrae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 114–27.

³⁴ See, for example, J. R. Morgan and Richard Stoneman, eds., Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context (London: Routledge, 1994). The Aethiopica of Heliodorus was highly influential upon Argenis, as it was upon Sidney’s Arcadia; for the context of its sixteenth-century revival see Victor Skretkowicz, European Erotic Romance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance Translation and English Literary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).

³⁵ Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, trans. Ambler, 23.

³⁶ Amadis, III.10 (631–6) and IV.2 (745–51); on Chambord see André Chastel, The Palace of Apolidon, The Zaharoff Lecture for 1984–85 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 11–12.