Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661.(Book Review)

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

By Laura Lunger Knoppers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xiii + 195 pages.

This is an important book for students of seventeenth-century English culture, the civil wars, republicanism, and (to a lesser extent) mid-century English literature. By investigating Oliver Cromwell's representation in "manuscript, print ephemera, canonical literature, paintings, engravings, and medals" (194), Laura Lunger Knoppers joins a group of scholars concerned with the politicized intersection of verbal and visual media in the Renaissance. Members of this group include Susan Frye, John King, and Julia Walker on the representations of Elizabeth I; Thomas Corns and Kevin Sharpe (et al.) on the images of Charles I; Paula Backscheider on the spectacle of Charles II; and Harry Berger on Rembrandt and the pose in early modern Italy.

Knoppers's book fills a gap in this scholarship--a gap produced by the tendency of literary critics to focus upon Cromwellian literature while ignoring other forms of his representation, by the tendency of art historians to dismiss "Cromwellian portraiture as an inept aping of monarchical forms" (3), and by the tendency of historians to overlook...

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