ABSTRACT
Janus-like, pulling in contradictory directions, the phrase ‘restoration’ neatly captures the profound ambivalence at work in the return of Charles II and monarchy to England in 1660. It was simultaneously a transgression of the previous Republican dispensations and Puritan regime – which had themselves implied a host of transgressions, the signal one being the traumatic 1649 regicide – and a return to the former mode of government and rule, passed on – transmitted – from Charles I to his son. It marks the paradoxical (re)emergence of a supposedly ‘new’ era via a return to the past, a transmitted transgression to redress an earlier transgression.
