Book contents
2 - Republican politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
On 29 December 1648, Elizabeth Poole confronted the Army Council at Whitehall, saying she had a message from God, conveyed to her in a vision. Surprisingly, the Council devoted three days to examining her claims, and at first what she said seemed rewarding. Poole declared that she had seen ‘the presence of God with the Army’ and outlined her vision:
there was a man, a member of the Army, that some time had bin shewed me, [expressing] his respect unto his country, to its liberty and freedome, which he should gladly be a sacrifice for. This persone was sett before me, and a woman which should signifie the weake and imperfect distressed state of this land on the other hand. The woman was full of imperfections, crooked, weake, sickly, imperfect. I … was to appear to the body of the Army in this man that hee should improve his faithfulnesse to the Kingdome, by his diligence in the cure of this person.
Poole equates the female body with the nation-state and the male body with its ruler. Like others, Poole writes the new government into legitimacy by describing it in metaphors used by the monarch. She casts the male figure of the army as a healer-sovereign, a figure at once Christ-like and professional. This figure is securely and unproblematically masculine, its strength guaranteed by the feminine weakness of its counterpart. In Poole's figuration of the land as woman, the female figure is ‘sickly’, ‘imperfect’, ‘crooked’ and requires male intervention for healing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005