Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print 1645–1661

by Laura Lunger Knoppers

• ISBN13: 9780521662611
• ISBN10: 0521662613
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-07-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Constructing Cromwell traces the complex and shifting popular images of Oliver Cromwell from his first appearance as a public figure in the mid-1640s through the period of his power to his death and eventual disinterment after the restoration of the monarchy. The meaning and impact of this enigmatic figure has long been debated in the context of mid seventeenth-century crisis but contemporary representations of Cromwell have largely been neglected. Cromwellian print, Laura Knoppers argues, transformed the courtly forms of Caroline ceremony, portraiture and panegyric and in turn complicated and altered the cultural forms available to Charles II. The book draws on extensive archival research, including manuscript sources, startling print ephemera, and visual artifacts. Placing canonical authors such as Milton, Marvell, Waller and Dryden alongside such neglected writers as George Wither and Payne Fisher, Knoppers demonstrates how literary texts both respond and contribute to political and cultural change.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
A note on texts	xiii
Introduction	1	(9)
``A Coffin for King Charles, A Crowne for Cromwell'': royalist satire and the regicide	10	(21)
Portraiture, print, and the republican heroic	31	(38)
``Riding in Triumph'': ceremony and print in the early Protectorate	69	(38)
Contesting Cromwell in the late Protectorate	107	(25)
``I saw him dead'': Cromwell's death and funeral	132	(35)
Ceremony, print, and punishment in the early Restoration	167	(27)
Afterword	194	(2)
Notes	196	(23)
Works cited	219	(23)
Index	242