"Under our Cedar's Shadow": Royalist Women Poets and the English Restoration

Yıl 2007, Cilt: 1 Sayı: 8, 1 - 16, 01.02.2007

Catherine Coussens

Öz

Anahtar Kelimeler

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“Under our Cedar’s Shadow”: Royalist Women Poets and the English Restoration

Öz

This paper compares the work of three lesser-known royalist women poets (Rachel Jevon, Ann Lee, and
the anonymous female author of The Sacred Historie) to explore the subtle ways in which these writers
connect their personal literary projects to the specific requirements of the Restoration regime. Despite the
strategic emphasis on masculine authority within the numerous panegyrics addressed to the king in the
aftermath of the Restoration in 1660, an alternative impulse in female-authored texts configures the return
of the monarchy as an event which women are especially qualified to celebrate. In elevating conventionally
feminine values, these poets were able to associate themselves with the social and political agenda of the
Restoration government, which aimed to reconcile the English people to their past, and ease tensions associated
with the Restoration Settlement, the General Pardon, and the Act of Oblivion. Since the civil wars had created
distrust and resentment concerning politics and polemic, women poets could exploit their position as literary
and political “outsiders” to justify their rehearsal of the role of “public” poet. However, in promoting their own
specific interests, as loyalists whose families had suffered for the Crown, women poets also assert their own
hopes for the future path of the monarchy, reminding the king of the significance of his traditional supporters,
and emphasising his duty to subordinate himself to God and the English Church. 

Anahtar Kelimeler

absolutism, loyalty, paternalism, subjection, forgiveness, humility, conservatism, integrity, faction, Anglicanism, praise