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.

Introduction; 1. The sceptre and the distaff: mapping the domestic in Caroline royal family portraiture; 2. 'Deare heart': framing the royal couple in The Kings Cabinet Opened; 3. Material legacies: family matters in Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes; 4. Recipes for royalism: Henrietta Maria and The Queens Closet Opened; 5. 'Protectresse and a drudge': the court and cookery of Elizabeth Cromwell; 6. 'No fear lest dinner coole': Milton's housewives and the politics of Eden; Afterword; Works cited.

Laura Lunger Knoppers is Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She has published widely on seventeenth-century British literature, visual culture, politics and religion, particularly on the works of John Milton. Her books include Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (1994) and Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (2000). She edited The 1671 Poems: Paradise Regain'd and Samson Agonistes for The Complete Works of John Milton (General Editors Thomas N. Corns and Gordon Campbell) and she is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women's Writing (2009) and Puritanism and its Discontents (2003).