Elizabeth's interest to control the ways in which she was represented to her subjects. She believed, like many Renaissance monarchs, in the idea of royal absolutism, the theory that ultimate power was quite properly concentrated in her person and indeed that God had appointed her to be His deputy in the kingdom. Opposition to her rule, in this view, was not only a political act but also a kind of impiety, a blasphemous grudging against the will of God. This view of the Queen's power was reiterated in speeches, political tracts, and from the pulpits of churches, where they were incorporated in the Book of Homilies that clergymen were required to read out to their congregations. Although she presented herself as a defender of the Protestant nation, Elizabeth also ensured that her subjects would revere her by reaching back to the Middle Ages and to the cult of the Virgin Mary. By defining herself as the Virgin Queen, she appropriated the popular emotion that had throughout England's long Catholic era been attached to Mary, and this allowed her to claim authority outside of conventional gender roles. In this portrait, Elizabeth I asserts the identity she had defined for herself by holding a sieve, a traditional symbol of virginity.