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Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration
  • Literature, Drama, History
  • Edited by Gerald MacLean
  • Published online: 20 August 2009
  • Print publication: 27 April 1995
  • What specifically distinguishes Restoration culture and society from what went before and came after? And how did early modern British women and men accommodate themselves to the dramatic historical changes of the seventeenth century? This study, which brings together recent work by leading historians as well as literary and cultural critics of the period, shows how the Restoration produced the concept of a national literature crucial to a new nationalist cultural enterprise: questions of national identity and difference, of what it meant to be English or British or both, came to be framed in terms of international trade and imperial ambition; and religious and royal authority gave way before the advance of a secular literary culture geared to the demands of a developing commercial and imperial nation.

  • 1 - Literature, culture, and society in Restoration England

  • Edited by Gerald MacLean, Wayne State University, Detroit
  • Book: Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration
  • Published online: 20 August 2009
  • Print publication: 27 April 1995, pp 3-28

  • Summary

    What we mean when we talk about the Stuart Restoration might at first seem clear enough. But like similar terms used to indicate both a specific historical event and a period, “Restoration” has been used in different ways for different purposes and has different meanings in different contexts. Most often, the Restoration appears simply as a date that marks the beginning or ending of some other period. Marking either the final exhaustion of the “Renaissance,” or the start of the long eighteenth century, the Restoration is frequently conceived as simply an adjacency. When studied as a political event, the Restoration can refer to those circumstances that made necessary and possible a return to monarchical government, and so primarily designates those events and negotiations of 1658–60 surrounding and immediately following Charles's return. But political historians have also taken a longer view and regard the Restoration as an uneasy, brief settlement within longer-term political negotiations among Crown, Parliament, Church, and people, the struggles over which continue through the Revolution of 1688 to reverberate well into the eighteenth century and beyond.

    For social and cultural historians, the years following the Restoration constitute a period of contending activities and attitudes, ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, that cannot entirely be accounted for in terms of the attempted political settlement of 1660.

    It has long been clear that the nation which summoned Charles back in 1660 differed considerably from the realm over which his father had once attempted to rule.

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