London Renaissance Seminar: Charles 1: Art. Legacy, Memory
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Exploring the relationship between sex, scandal and political transformations from bedroom to battlefield, this event explores Charles I and Henrietta-Maria’s marriage and the start of the road to divorce. Join Samuel Fullerton (University of California) and Birkbeck’s Judith Hudson to find out more about real and fake news of Charles I’s marital bliss and his subject’s strategies for weaselling out of wedlock. This is the London Renaissance Seminar Summer lecture and the speakers discuss ‘Confronting Royal Bodies: Sexual Politics and the English Revolution’ and 'From bed and company: Divorce and Anxiety in Seventeenth-Century England’.
“This talk explores the landscape of seventeenth century divorce, a landscape that ranged from bigamous remarriages to scandalous alimony suits. Seventeenth century society was outraged and fascinated by such cases and scaremongering assertions reinforced this anxiety - ‘divorces are now as common, as scolding at Billingsgate’. Was divorce *really* rife in early modern England? How did it work in practice and how did separating couples craft a narrative that would allow them to achieve their desired ends - either legally or outside the law?” - Judith Hudson
“The English Revolution (1642-1660) witnessed a radical transformation in contemporary attitudes toward royal sexuality. Although the monarch had been largely protected from indecent commentary prior to the outbreak of civil war, during the 1640s parliamentarians and royalists alike made sex into a central theme of civil war politics by publicly debating, for the first time, the sexual capacities of King Charles I as both man and monarch. As a result, by the 1660 Stuart Restoration, royal sexuality had become a routine element of English political discourse.” - Sam Fullerton
Contact name:
Sue Wiseman