{"title":"Solitude and Soul in Restoration Britain","authors":"Barbara Taylor","doi":"10.1093/pastj/gtad007","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"In 1672 John Evelyn, Restoration courtier, diarist and polymath, formed a platonic soul union with Margaret Blagge (later Godolphin), a young maid of honour in Queen Catherine’s household. Both were devout Anglicans whose religious practices were shaped by their love of ‘recesse’. For four years they enacted a spiritual solitude à deux in an emotionally charged relationship lived out through private prayer and epistolary devotional exchanges, until Margaret’s marriage and death in childbirth. Solitude was then, as it had long been, highly contentious. In the 1660s Evelyn had debated it with a Scottish lawyer named George Mackenzie. In a spirit of mock argument common at the time, Evelyn had taken the anti-solitude side. Yet despite the playfulness of the debate, it highlighted tensions in Evelyn’s love of solitude that played out across his life, reaching an emotional peak in his soul union with Margaret. For Margaret, too, life with Evelyn was fraught as she struggled with melancholic miseries long associated with solitude, compounded by a conflict between her reclusive devotional life with him and her engagement to the courtier Sidney Godolphin. Tracking the story of this complex spiritual partnership provides intimate insights into the psychological stakes of the solitude tradition and its varying implications for women and men in Restoration Britain.","PeriodicalId":47870,"journal":{"name":"Past & Present","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Past & Present","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtad007","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
In 1672 John Evelyn, Restoration courtier, diarist and polymath, formed a platonic soul union with Margaret Blagge (later Godolphin), a young maid of honour in Queen Catherine’s household. Both were devout Anglicans whose religious practices were shaped by their love of ‘recesse’. For four years they enacted a spiritual solitude à deux in an emotionally charged relationship lived out through private prayer and epistolary devotional exchanges, until Margaret’s marriage and death in childbirth. Solitude was then, as it had long been, highly contentious. In the 1660s Evelyn had debated it with a Scottish lawyer named George Mackenzie. In a spirit of mock argument common at the time, Evelyn had taken the anti-solitude side. Yet despite the playfulness of the debate, it highlighted tensions in Evelyn’s love of solitude that played out across his life, reaching an emotional peak in his soul union with Margaret. For Margaret, too, life with Evelyn was fraught as she struggled with melancholic miseries long associated with solitude, compounded by a conflict between her reclusive devotional life with him and her engagement to the courtier Sidney Godolphin. Tracking the story of this complex spiritual partnership provides intimate insights into the psychological stakes of the solitude tradition and its varying implications for women and men in Restoration Britain.
期刊介绍:
Founded in 1952, Past & Present is widely acknowledged to be the liveliest and most stimulating historical journal in the English-speaking world. The journal offers: •A wide variety of scholarly and original articles on historical, social and cultural change in all parts of the world. •Four issues a year, each containing five or six major articles plus occasional debates and review essays. •Challenging work by young historians as well as seminal articles by internationally regarded scholars. •A range of articles that appeal to specialists and non-specialists, and communicate the results of the most recent historical research in a readable and lively form. •A forum for debate, encouraging productive controversy.