This study analyzes the pervasively used analogy of the family in order to investigate afresh its roles under the social, political, and linguistic pressures felt in (mainly) England in the period from the early to the late Stuarts. Thus, the monograph returns to an important and productive “angle” in the study of seventeenth-century political, social, and literary texts, one that has seen outstanding work both in the field of political theory (Gordon Schochet) and in the study of literary evidence (Margaret J. Ezell) but has more recently been to some extent eclipsed by a focus on the thorny questions of republic and, especially, republicanism. Ng's is a timely and significant book in its returning to the textual evidence of a way of thinking used in all manner of texts by seventeenth-century men and women.

Taking up Gordon Schochet's point that the use of the familial metaphor does not lead inescapably to a patriarchal conclusion, the monograph explores diverse uses of the analogy and, more specifically, the metaphor of the family. Ng's decision to move away from discussion of the analogy of the family within the highly confined canon of political theory (where it continues to be studied as though almost a logical development from Hobbes, Filmer, and Locke, with sometimes a digression on Milton) is a welcome step and key to the form her study takes. It explores texts as distinct in their political commitments as James I's Basilicon Doron and Edward Sexby's Killing Noe Murder; texts as different in genre as Thomas Hobbes's De Cive and The Masque of Queens, in which James I's consort danced; texts occupying wholly incommensurate places in our own literary canons, such as printed news of Oliver Cromwell's death and John Milton's Paradise Lost.

As Ng rightly argues, this textual diversity is implied by the evidence: as she reminds us, the seventeenth-century reader did not see literary texts as hived off from political texts or vice versa. At the same time, any move away from the narrow and policed canon of political theory potentially allows entry into the theater of debate in almost every text from Basilicon Doron to Lucius Junius Brutus. Swimming in texts using ideas of family, the contemporary writer needs ways to group and distinguish texts. Working outside the tried and trusted, or maybe just unquestioned, boundaries of political theory provides writers such as Ng with opportunities to see afresh relationships among texts usually held separate but also brings to the fore a need to convey to a reader the why and how of putting particular texts in relation to each other. Thus, while it is true that political texts have literary charge and that literary texts convey political visions, it is also, undoubtedly, true that because of the way texts came to readers they were likely to be apprehended differently. Paradise Lost and De Cive would have come to readers in some of the same ways and in some very different ways. Alarmingly, though, Killing Noe Murder, advocating the murder of Oliver Cromwell, might share format, physical similarities, and points of sale with very different texts. How did readers come to the metaphor of family?

Ng's monograph makes highly cogent and, generally, productive decisions about how to deal with the many issues generated by questions of genre; provenance; and social, economic, and readerly, as well as political, location. The book is structured chronologically, starting with the Stuarts and ending with an epilogue on the family-state analogy in the eighteenth century. This is a very ambitious span of material and, although at times Ng does have to pause to use scholarship to “fill in the story so far,” in the main the book offers an excellent, sometimes mind-stretching, combination of detailed textual analysis, careful location in the field that has mainly responded to that text, and acute observation.

The first section of the book offers four chapters grouped under the heading “Revolutionary Debates.” Starting with the diverse and contradictory writings of James I, this chapter examines both Basilicon Doron and The Masque of Queens and makes the excellent point that James's very varied use of the metaphor of family made possible his own complex and compelling articulation of the significances of family ties. Set against this contradiction, although still inevitably more inconsistent than its representation in some scholarship, Milton's prose contention with the figures of family has a clearer political program. Not only does Milton show the possibility of vice spreading to the public sphere while private virtue finds that leap inhibited, but, as Ng argues, he also makes it a lifetime struggle to expose the literal uses of the metaphor of the family and to show the misleading effects of misuse. The third chapter tackles the problem of Hobbes's understanding of the family and use of the analogy, which, she helpfully notes, can indeed seem “bewilderingly contradictory” (78). To this mighty debate she adds the key point that, given that for Hobbes power is all, just as his state has all power concentrated in a nonpatriarchal king, so in the Hobbesian family, too, power remains unelaborated. The fourth chapter addresses the fascinating topic of the analogy of the family in shaping the place of Oliver Cromwell as ruler and “Protector.” Ng takes up the fascinating question of Cromwell's sudden death and Richard's inheritance as well as exploring aspects of the radical and republican opposition to his rule.

Ng's helpfully energetic and detailed engagement with primary texts in these four chapters illuminates fascinatingly for the reader that in attempting to study the location, articulation, and influence of the family analogy in seventeenth-century culture, it is certainly possible to find it at work in tyrannicidal and republican thought as well as in meditations on kingship. The texts in which this can be found are very different from each other not only in aim, scope, and genre location but also in the distinct disciplinary places in which debates on them are now located. As must be clear, one text that is addressed will have been discussed by modern scholars working in political theory, another by literary scholars—and, accordingly, Ng's study seeks to modulate and balance not only different views but different disciplinary perspectives on her material.

The second part of the monograph follows these debates into the Restoration to explore the importance of secondariness in Paradise Lost; marriage and Henrietta Maria in Margaret Cavendish's Restoration politics—for Ng, a kind of Stuart royalism reasserted; the status of the family in Quaker thought; and, finally, the publication of Locke's Two Treatises of Civil Government (1698) and on into the eighteenth century.

This is a significant study that largely realizes its ambitious aim to trace the many political purposes to which the analogy of the family might be put and to acknowledge and explore its overlapping presence in texts understood as literary, religious, and political. Ng's emphasis on the social as well as political force of the metaphor is to be welcomed. Scholars may take issue with some of the readings offered, but those readings are thorough and attentively worked out. If, at times, there is so much to attend to that reflection on the potentially fascinating wider analytical, taxonomic, methodological, and disciplinary implications get squeezed out (Do we retain or eschew the concept of a “literary” text? To what extent do differences between primary texts, and between their scholarly receptions, matter?), then that is a minor quibble. It is clear that Ng is aware of them, and I hope she will write more on them. In sum, this is a strong and ambitious monograph and a serious and considered contribution to renewed interdisciplinary study of the familial analogy.