The Restoration, 1660-1688 (review)

Reviews 169 then greatest tension in the formative period of the courtly ethos, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and at then weakestresolutionin the early m o d e m absolutist state anatomized so brilliantly by Elias. The epic, the romance, the love lyric do not simply equate with separate codes, least of all the love lyric. The genres, moreover, evolved in rather different ways in Provence, Germany, and northern France, reflecting differences of aristocratic social structure. Comparing troubadour poety and minnesang, Scaglione goes beyond the superficial standard explanation that the minnesang 'was the creation of a higher nobility, hence not possibly polemical against it' and sees, surely correctiy, that 'the reason for the differences is the greater stability of court life and family relations as well as the infrequency of knights errant (vagantes) in German lands'. Similiarly Scgalione has a bracing approach to the old and vital question of woman's place in courtly love and lyric. Building on a splendid analysis of one of the most remarkable lyrics of Guilhelm IX of Aquitane about the lady he had never seen yet loves heartily (Anc non la vi et am la fort), he postulates 'the unreality of the woman's presence in medieval literature, even whUe she is, conversely, the centre of attention of much of the literary and artistic discourse'. W o m a n is, not only to Guilhelm IX, 'the knight's chivalric and courteous self and the list of virtues and adjectives 'attributed to the courtly w o m a n is more or less the same as for the man'. Was the courtly w o m a n an image of Narcissus? This is a major book with a dazzling series of thought-provoking insights throughout the text and in the fascinating endnotes. Everyone concerned with the cultural flowering of the later Middle Ages and Renaissance should read Aldo Scaglione. R. Ian Jack Department of History University of Sydney Seaward, Paul, The Restoration, 1660-1688 (British history in perspective series), London, Macmillan, 1991; paper, pp. vii, 173; R.R.P. £7.99. Paul Seaward's account of Restoration England raises a fundamental historiographical problem. H o w can historians give a coherent description of incoherence without distorting the past? The dominant features of Restoration politics outlined by Seaward were fear, suspicion, anxiety, and uncertainty, intermingled with frequent bouts of hysteria, but the even tenor 170 Reviews of Seaward's admirably clear and logical discussion seems at odds with the very history it describes. That might seem irrelevant to most students, to w h o m this rewarding book can be safely entrusted, but more discerning readers might be concerned that Seaward's very narrative success leaves the impression that no alternative account exists, since he avoids any examination of conflicting historiographical approaches to the period. That omission raises doubts which are not stilled by those issues, such as Charles II's foreign policy and the hysterical episode of the Popish Plot, which Seaward's impeccably logical account reduces to an order that may not have been apparent to the participants and may not be agreed upon by historians. Seaward's approach has clear advantages when setting out the dilemmas which faced the restored monarchy: political violence and related religious disunity, the balance of liberty and authority, and tangled foreign relations with European powers. These were inherited from the Interregnum and remained essentially unresolved in 1688. Despite the fervency of gentry royalism, the perceived economic and social threats to their status made the gentry paranoidly distrustful of the Crown, the vulgar, and dissenters. Worried by the corrupting 'management' of Parliament by ministers, by Charles's flirtation with both Protestant dissent and popery, and by the Crown's political manipulation of local government, members of the political nation never enjoyed that mutual confidence with Charles which then conception of the Ancient Constitution led them to expect. The authoritarian possibilities of monarchical power, exposed by the behaviour of Charles's government in Scotland and Ireland, were not lost on parliamentary gentiemen who were as perplexed by the direction of his foreign policy as the king himself m a y have been, despite the logical plausibility that Seaward attributes...