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. He was a virtuoso: a man of letters and of science, highly intellectual and devoutly spiritual. This is an absorbing new study of the most controversial episode of his life: his passionate 'seraphic' friendship with Margaret Godolphin, a maid of honour at the Restoration court of Charles II. Was Evelyn in his way as much a sexual predator as the rakes he professed to despise, or does the. episode provide an unexpected slant on contemporary spirituality? Set against the vivid background of the court and."@en
"This volume is an account of the curiously passionate but platonic friendship that arose between English writer and diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706) and Margaret Godolphin (1652-1678). Godolphin was a maid of honor in the court of King Charles II of England. When they met, Evelyn was a civil servant and horticulturalist, 48 years old, and had been married for more than two decades; Godolphin was 17. Evelyn's friendship with Godolphin is recorded in a diary, which he says he designed "to consecrate her worthy life to posterity". Set against the vivid background of the court and the great gardens of the time, this work provides insights into the sexual and spiritual worlds of early modern England."

"Transformations of love : the friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin"
"Transformations of love : the friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin"@en
"Transformations of love the friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin"
"Transformations of love the friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin"@en