TY  - BOOK
AU  - Peters,Erin
TI  - “The greatest and most shameful laughing stock in the world”: Narrating national shame in 1660
PY  - 2017///.
							
N1  - 94
N2  - In this paper, I examine evidence of the efforts made by the Restoration regime to impose a palpable sense of collective shame on the nation for the events of the Interregnum years. Quite apart from the government-decreed national forgiveness and amnesia for the years between 1649- 1660, in the form of the 1660 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, an analysis of a selection of royalist and regime-sponsored popular prints from the Restoration year 1660 demonstrates attempts to impose a sense of national shame upon the collective memories of the past. My paper will examine a selection of this print material and argue that collective shame was introduced by the returning regime both to create the impression of popular support and consent for the Restoration and to discredit the previous republican regime. Furthermore, my paper will explore the possibility that the narration—and the sufferance—of shame at the collective level represented, in some ways, a redemptive strategy. Under the royalist-approved mantle of atonement, the acknowledgment of a general national shame helped to overwrite shameful individual acts and thus shelter the nation from its troubled past
UR  - https://shs.cairn.info/journal-dix-septieme-siecle-2017-2-page-269?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
ER  -