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Opening the Queen’s Closet: Henrietta Maria,Elizabeth Cromwell, and the Politics of Cookery*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Laura Lunger Knoppers
Laura Lunger Knoppers*
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
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Abstract

The essay shows how two royalist recipe books — The Queens Closet Opened (1655) and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth (1664) — fashioned Henrietta Maria (1609–69) and Elizabeth Cromwell (1598–1665) as very different housewives to the English nation. By portraying the much-disliked French Catholic Henrietta Maria as engaged in English domestic practices, The Queens Closet Opened implicitly responded to the scandalous private revelations of The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645); while, in contrast, the satiric cookery book attributed to Elizabeth Cromwell stigmatized her as both a country bumpkin and a foreigner. Yet the cookery books also had unintended republicanizing effects, as consumers appropriated the contents of the queen’s closet for their own cabinets and kitchens.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , Summer 2007 , pp. 464 - 499
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 Renaissance Society of America

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Footnotes

*

An early version of this essay was given at a 2003 Harvard Alumni Symposium on “New Work in the Renaissance,” and I am grateful for many helpful suggestions given at that time. Detailed and insightful reports provided by Jayne Archer and by one anonymous reader for Renaissance Quarterly usefully guided my revisions. I have also benefited from conversations about this project with Dan Beaver, Katie Field, and Marcy North.

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