What do you think?
Rate this book
Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin
John Evelyn ranks with his friend Samuel Pepys as one of the best loved of English diarists. This is an absorbing new study of the most controversial episode of his his passionate "seraphic" friendship with Margaret Godolphin, a maid of honor at the Restoration court of Charles II. Set against the vivid background of the court and the great gardens of the time, Transformations of Love provides new insights into the sexual and spiritual worlds of early modern England.
Hardcover
First published March 13, 2003
1 person is currently reading
52 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 17, 2015
Well, that escalated quickly...
I didn't start out intending to read a scholarly 300-page triple biography of a maid of honour, a prominent diarist, and a rising politician in the Restoration court. My original ambition was quite a bit humbler. A friend had given me a very enthusiastic recommendation of the classic seventeenth century hagiography The Life of Mrs Godolphin : "Forget about Frances Stewart, this is the story of a maid of honour at Charles II's court who not only resisted the lax morals of the court, but actually lived an exemplary and devout Christian life there!"
Of course I wanted to hear more, and had the opportunity to dip into the Life itself a month or two back. Within the first quarter of the short book, however, I began to feel lost and a little disturbed. The Life itself was written by a friend of Margaret Godolphin's, a much older man, the diarist John Evelyn, with whom she'd forged a close and passionately intense platonic friendship the likes of which is totally alien to our modern sensibilities. My questions led me to this book by Frances Harris.
In this excellent and very well-researched book, Harris outlines the life and impact of Margaret Godolphin, her friendship with Evelyn and her marriage to the able young Sidney Godolphin (later to forge a political alliance with John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and shoot to national prominence under Queen Anne). In addition to shedding much light on Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin's relationship (yes, the religious context was sincere if not always healthy, and yes, both Evelyn's wife and Margaret's husband knew of and approved the friendship, to the extent that after her death Godolphin repeatedly begged Evelyn to take him into his confidence to the same extent), Harris also does an excellent job outlining the spiritual condition of the Restoration court (it was not without sincere devotion) and that peculiar super-heated thing, the seventeenth-century platonic friendship.
Harris approaches her topic with a broadmindedness and sensitivity that places her subjects' religion front and centre on the stage. I felt she was sympathetic enough to understand it. She compares and contrasts platonic or "seraphick" love with the love of Puritan-style "companionate" marriage, arguing that no matter how companionable, like-minded and tender a marriage might be, it was still seen as fundamentally an unequal union: only in platonic friendship could a woman relate to a man as an equal. I'm unconvinced by this; I think Harris may be doing some jugglery with the concept of equality. The captain of a ship may think his first mate on a spiritually or mentally equal level with himself, or even above it. But his office gives him precedence in matters of authority. Harris's conception of Christian marriage would also seem to preclude the notion of an equal friendship between an employee and his boss, for instance.
All the same, this book has got me thinking pretty deeply about the meaning and diverse merits of love and friendship, where the line lies between the two (different for everybody, I think), and what we can learn from even the imperfect friendships of people like John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin about the importance of Christian friendship.
I didn't start out intending to read a scholarly 300-page triple biography of a maid of honour, a prominent diarist, and a rising politician in the Restoration court. My original ambition was quite a bit humbler. A friend had given me a very enthusiastic recommendation of the classic seventeenth century hagiography The Life of Mrs Godolphin : "Forget about Frances Stewart, this is the story of a maid of honour at Charles II's court who not only resisted the lax morals of the court, but actually lived an exemplary and devout Christian life there!"
Of course I wanted to hear more, and had the opportunity to dip into the Life itself a month or two back. Within the first quarter of the short book, however, I began to feel lost and a little disturbed. The Life itself was written by a friend of Margaret Godolphin's, a much older man, the diarist John Evelyn, with whom she'd forged a close and passionately intense platonic friendship the likes of which is totally alien to our modern sensibilities. My questions led me to this book by Frances Harris.
In this excellent and very well-researched book, Harris outlines the life and impact of Margaret Godolphin, her friendship with Evelyn and her marriage to the able young Sidney Godolphin (later to forge a political alliance with John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and shoot to national prominence under Queen Anne). In addition to shedding much light on Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin's relationship (yes, the religious context was sincere if not always healthy, and yes, both Evelyn's wife and Margaret's husband knew of and approved the friendship, to the extent that after her death Godolphin repeatedly begged Evelyn to take him into his confidence to the same extent), Harris also does an excellent job outlining the spiritual condition of the Restoration court (it was not without sincere devotion) and that peculiar super-heated thing, the seventeenth-century platonic friendship.
Harris approaches her topic with a broadmindedness and sensitivity that places her subjects' religion front and centre on the stage. I felt she was sympathetic enough to understand it. She compares and contrasts platonic or "seraphick" love with the love of Puritan-style "companionate" marriage, arguing that no matter how companionable, like-minded and tender a marriage might be, it was still seen as fundamentally an unequal union: only in platonic friendship could a woman relate to a man as an equal. I'm unconvinced by this; I think Harris may be doing some jugglery with the concept of equality. The captain of a ship may think his first mate on a spiritually or mentally equal level with himself, or even above it. But his office gives him precedence in matters of authority. Harris's conception of Christian marriage would also seem to preclude the notion of an equal friendship between an employee and his boss, for instance.
All the same, this book has got me thinking pretty deeply about the meaning and diverse merits of love and friendship, where the line lies between the two (different for everybody, I think), and what we can learn from even the imperfect friendships of people like John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin about the importance of Christian friendship.
November 15, 2015
Frances Harris has written the definitive work on the friendship between John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin. No doubt many relationships such as these existed, but Evelyn's prominence as a Restoration diarist and general Renaissance-man and the surprising survival of his private hagiography of Margaret provides us with a window into a world of relationships almost utterly unlike our own. It's a view that is both poignant and frustrating.
Harris is intelligent, humane, and elegant in her treatment of the characters and their story. I'm also keenly appreciative of her refusal to trivialise the all-pervading (Anglo-Catholic) Christianity of their world. She is a historian par excellence.
Since reading this 2 years ago, I've become much more of a Roundhead, so it really grieves me now to remember Evelyn's gloating over the severed heads of the regicides after the Restoration. I'd recommend "The Tyrrancide Brief" for anyone who still has any fond sentiments for Charles I, or stereotypes of angry Puritans dispatching him.
Harris is intelligent, humane, and elegant in her treatment of the characters and their story. I'm also keenly appreciative of her refusal to trivialise the all-pervading (Anglo-Catholic) Christianity of their world. She is a historian par excellence.
Since reading this 2 years ago, I've become much more of a Roundhead, so it really grieves me now to remember Evelyn's gloating over the severed heads of the regicides after the Restoration. I'd recommend "The Tyrrancide Brief" for anyone who still has any fond sentiments for Charles I, or stereotypes of angry Puritans dispatching him.
March 15, 2016
So dense as to render itself completely inaccessible or readable for mere mortals as myself. So dry it worked quite often to help me escape my insomnia.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews