Abstract

Henry Neville, exponent of seventeenth-century British republicanism, through his works revives the ideas of freedom, religious tolerance and popular sovereignty, pivotal ideas for the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. Neville’s republicanism is animated by the desire to overturn the patriarchal foundation of monarchical legitimacy. In The Parliament of Ladies, an original libel published in 1647, he uses a satirical language with libertine allusions. His anti-patriarchalism does not intervene on the gender hierarchies but merely focuses on the State order, using the category of effeminacy as a weapon of derision and delegitimization of the realist front as well as to denounce the moral corruption of parliamentarians.