Politicizing domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton's Eve

"Bringing together literary texts, political and household writings, and visual images, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton's Eve traces how the language of the domestic became a powerful and contested tool of political propaganda in representations of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, Oliver and Elizabeth Cromwell, and Milton's Adam and Eve. The book reconstitutes a lively seventeenth-century discourse that ranges from van Dyck portraiture to political texts such as Eikon Basilike and Kings Cabinet Opened, to cookery books attributed to Henrietta Maria and Elizabeth Cromwell, to Milton's Paradise Lost. Extensive archival materials are drawn upon, including holograph letters, legal documents, little-known portraits and early readers' marginalia. Challenging previous binaries of public and private, political and domestic, Knoppers demonstrates that the domestication of the royal family image is an important and largely unrecognized legacy of the English Revolution. The study will appeal to scholars of political and cultural history, literature, book history and women's studies"--

"On the evidence of novels, poetry and paintings, the Victorians were obsessed with the English Revolution. Imagining the British past as prototype of an idealized present, the Victorian cult of domesticity drew upon the image of the Caroline royal family. Frederick Goodall's 1853 An Episode in the Happier Days of Charles I (fig. 1) depicts Charles I, Henrietta Maria and their young children feeding geese, while on a royal shallop barge moving slowly down the Thames. A characteristically van Dyckian Charles I, sporting long hair, brushed-up moustache and pointed beard, dressed in a black silk doublet with falling ruff collar, and wearing his lesser George medallion, stands over his seated wife and daughter. Henrietta Maria, her hair stylishly dressed in side ringlets, wears a deep rose satin gown with an elaborate collar and large, puff sleeves; holding a King Charles spaniel in her lap, the queen attends closely to her rosy and plump-cheeked young daughter, who is feeding two large swans"--