This dissertation examines how classical history and gendered conceptions of masculine governance and misgovernance shaped the political culture of seventeenth-century England, the distinctive character of English republican thought, and the cultural and intellectual origins of the English Revolution. By attending to a series of classical stories about lustful and incestuous tyrants, republican revolution, matricide, and Christian persecution, which were appropriated through imaginative literature and discourse, this dissertation argues that Englishmen developed a significant ethical and political vocabulary of tyranny that imagined and condemned misgovernance in highly gendered terms, characterizing the tyrant as effeminate, uxorious, idolatrous, violent, and enslaved.The following chapters maintain that this classical and gendered understanding of tyranny greatly affected English perceptions and public criticisms of King James and King Charles.Through an examination especially of John Milton’s writings, it further maintains that this discourse shaped the burgeoning republican vocabulary of seventeenth-century England, for conceptions of gender played a central and primary role in republican discourses of virtue, liberty, citizenship, and good governance, and marriage was envisioned as a significant republican institution.The study concludes by demonstrating the importance of classical and gendered conceptions of governance during the Interregnum, arguing that the grammar of tyranny developed in the Stuart period became a central criterion whereby republican writers understood, defended and criticized Oliver Cromwell and his government.
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Gender, Tyranny, and Republicanism in England, 1603-1660
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