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• Title: Love's Ambassador: Religion and the Politics of Marriage in the Private Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby/Love's Ambassador: Sir Kenelm Digby'nin Ozel Anilarinda Din Ve Evlilik Politikasi (Critical Essay)
• Author : Interactions
• Release Date : January 22, 2009
• Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
• Pages : * pages
• Size : 125 KB

Description

Plenty has been written about early modern women's deployment of 'private' genres and discourses to define and describe their roles in the public world. (1) However, male authors were also aware of the possibilities of 'private writing' to interrogate their public roles from unconventional perspectives. The subject of this paper is Sir Kenelm Digby's Loose Fantasies (c.1628), a romance memoir recounting his courtship of Venetia Stanley (stylised as the romance of Theagenes and Stelliana) and their secret marriage in 1625. In writing his own life as romance, Digby self-consciously occupied a genre popularly associated with women. However, as Laurie Humphrey Newcomb has said, despite the fact that during the early modern period the romance genre gradually became defined as feminine, men remained its chief consumers (121). Popular perceptions of a female readership for romance could enable male authors to critique recent and contemporary politics and history within an apparently trivial erotic narrative. In a related argument, Juliet Fleming has identified the cultural contexts and functions of the "ladies' text": that is texts ostensibly addressed to women but seeking the interest and approval of male readers. According to Fleming, in addressing a text to women male authors either "render ironic its ostensible content, or [...] mark the fact of its negotiation with a female audience which it would have preferred to eschew" (23-4). Despite apparently being offered for female consumption, such texts demonstrate what Breitenberg has identified as the inevitable "masculine anxiety" fostered in a society "infused with patriarchal assumptions about power, privilege, sexual desire, the body" (1). As I will show, Digby's anxiety to assert his masculine credentials is certainly a key factor shaping the text. However, his strategic occupation of the apparently feminine world of personal, romantic memoir also enables him to explore the inconsistent politics of dynastic courtship in the early 1620s, an important subtext which tends to have been neglected in favour of a biographical focus on his marriage and reputation. (2) Written in the wake of the failure of James I's plan to marry his son to the Spanish Infanta Maria, and Prince Charles's eventual marriage to another Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France, the text represents an assertive statement of Digby's primary allegiance to the Roman Catholic faith to which he publicly returned in 1635, but which, his memoir makes clear, he privately embraced throughout the 1620s. The manuscript (British Library, Harleian 6758) has been carefully copied with some sections deleted or corrected, and others represented in code and cipher to disguise politically sensitive or potentially libellous material. The text was apparently composed during Digby's absence from England in 1628, three years after his marriage, and focuses mainly on his adventures abroad in the 1620s. The explanatory epilogue must have been added after his wife's death, since the last line expresses his hope that when his time on earth is over he will be reunited with her (Private Memoirs 328). The plot resembles that of popular political romances like Philip Sidney's Arcadia (c. 1590) and John Barclay's Argenis (c. 1621) in its depiction of a love affair between well-born protagonists, disrupted by hostile political forces, familial opposition and unfriendly rivals: however, it was not designed for print publication, and remained in manuscript until 1827, when a bowdlerised version was published, with the excised or altered sections printed privately as Castrations from the Private Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby the same year, and subsequently added as an appendix in later editions (henceforth, the main text will be cited as PM and the excised sections as PM Appendix). The first full edition was published in Rome (Gabrieli, 1968).

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