Portuguese Diplomacy and the Written Representations of Queen Elizabeth I: a Bridge between Two Worlds SUSANA DE MAGALHÃES OLIVEIRA Te young Elizabeth Tudor admitted that “the invention of letters seems to me the most clever, excellent, and ingenious” (11). Historians and biog- raphers have long made use of letters to shed some light into the past, and one ofen fnds personalis (private letters) and negotialis (letters of afairs) as primary sources in their works. In this context, diplomatic correspondence, which belongs to the latter category, stands out as a signifcant contribution to our understanding of the past, a sort of a metaphorical bridge between two worlds: the past and the present. In the early modern period, monarchs rarely met in person. Charles Beem highlights the importance of the ambassadors’ reports, as well as of literary and iconographic depictions during Elizabeth’s reign, a “queen who never lef her kingdom” (iii). Terefore, ambassadors may also be perceived as metaphorical bridges, in the sense of being the channel through which the nations communicated and negotiated with one another: they were their sovereigns’ ears and eyes in foreign courts, and the success of foreign afairs depended largely on them. Diplomatic correspondence encapsulated, therefore, invaluable infor- mation sent to their home courts, much of which included the ambassadors’ own representations of ‘Otherness’. According to James Young, the ambassa- dors’ written descriptions of ‘Otherness’ may be considered representations, since “all conditions of being a representation can be met by a description”: the authors intended to represent an “object”, and their readers recognised that the ambassadors’ descriptions stood for the “object” (Young 130). And, as Emma Mason observes, historians are particularly indebted to such for- eign accounts of ‘Otherness’, by virtue of the ambassadors’ penchant for detailed and witty descriptions. 1 Ambassadors become, once again, a met- aphorical bridge, for they connect sameness and diference, in the sense that 1 Especially with reference to the French ambassadors to the Tudor court, Eustace Chapuys and Charles de Marillac, (History Extra “Trough Foreign Eyes”, 30 th November 2016).