Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton's Eve

Knoppers examines the domestic image of the royal family as a contested propaganda tool in the English Revolution and beyond.

Explores the highly contested seventeenth-century marketing of monarchy through domestic images of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, Oliver and Elizabeth Cromwell, and Milton's Adam and Eve. Employing an innovative approach, the book demonstrates important new connections between Caroline family portraiture, political tracts, royalist cookery books and Milton's Paradise Lost.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.