Description
TitleHeadlong he runs into Circe's snares
Date Created2012
Other Date2012-10 (degree)
Extentix, 330 p.
DescriptionHeadlong he runs into Circe’s snares: Representation and the Restoration Royal Mistress is an interdisciplinary study of the Restoration royal mistress. During the Restoration and for generations thereafter, the mistresses of Charles II (reigned 1660-1685) came to symbolize the court both for its apologizers and its critics. In becoming such symbols, the figures of these women were made to play a role within the many social, religious, and political concerns during this tumultuous period. In focusing upon representation, this dissertation does not look to recover the actual actions (political or otherwise) of royal mistresses such as Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, or Nell Gwyn – arguably the three most important and well-known of Charles’s many mistresses – but rather to see how the figures of these women were used to ‘think through’ contemporary issues. Bringing in various sources including poetry, libels, novels, histories, and medical books, this project examines how women were made to play central roles within political comment and rhetoric. In appropriating the faces and voices of women, the authors of these works demonstrate not only their opinions on English society and politics, but also the important underpinning gendered assumptions which informed their uses of royal mistresses within their works, allowing this study to bring together political history, women’s and gender history, history of medicine, and the history of the body. This dissertation is structured thematically, and the hermeneutic nature of its analysis is not meant to be a definitive account of the meaning of its sources, but instead to investigate common themes among clusters of sources including the Ottoman ‘Turk’ and harem politics, diseased and reproductive female bodies, and the uses of the memory of royal mistresses into the early Hanoverian period. Such themes allow for the insertion of women onto the early modern English political stage.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Meagan Ryan Schenkelberg
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Languageeng
CollectionGraduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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