Subjects and Objects: Material Expressions of Love and Loyalty in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

F or the governors of early modern England, an awareness of "how the people stood affected to the present State" was necessarily an issue of constant concern. That affection was judged in relation to a Christian Humanist concept of love, which combined the virtuous, physical, and reciprocal passions of caritas, eros, and anteros. 1 Indeed, love was explicitly and consistently reiterated as being fundamental to the bonding of the disparate and largely volunteer-governed state. Conceptualizing the bonds of loyalty in this way entailed upon both governors and governed a communitarian idea of citizenship. 2 It was, however, religiously exclusive. While Protestants (preferably Anglicans) had a monopoly on the virtue of love, other religious and national groups, especially papists, Jews, and Turks, were seen as necessarily motivated by the vicious passions of lust and envy and could neither be loyal nor deserving of loyalty. 3 As philosopher R. E. Ewin argued, loyalty is not itself a virtue: it is a vehicle through which virtues, such as love, can operate and by which the benefits of virtue-for example, feelings of joy or satisfaction-can accrue. 4 Angela McShane (formerly McShane-Jones) is Tutor in Graduate Studies (post-1600) for the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A)/

Review of periodical literature published in 2009

“…By 1657 he was trying to set up a stud, ‘either to augment the grandeur of his court or for his own private pleasure’. Jacobsen describes how the Restoration statesman Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington, used luxury consumption of fine Continental art, furniture, and architecture to display his political influence and closeness to the king, while McShane argues that material goods and ballads helped to emphasize a ‘love’ between rulers and subjects which was in many ways contractual. Tackling pre‐Great Fire merchant culture, Schofield et al. report from excavations at Botolph Wharf in the City of London.…”