Panting Sentinels: Erotics, Politics, and Redemption in the Friendship Poetry of Katherine Philips (1631–1664)

Abstract

After reviewing recent literary criticism regarding the erotic potential and political implications of Katherine Philips’s friendship verses, this essay works directly from Poems (1667) to argue that the poet’s conceptualization of friendship was as a vehicle for religious redemption inspired by Queen Henrietta Maria’s devout humanism and the Caroline court’s Religion of Love. Although current Philips criticism discusses the stated devotional aims of same-sex friendship as the poet’s efforts to deflect potential sexualized readings, this essay finds that in the only edition of Philips’s poetry that was authorized by the poet, friendship and religious redemption are thoroughly intertwined.