1This dossier, “Consent and the English Restoration: signs, narratives, performance”, is the outcome of joint conferences led by two CNRS research groups, the Institute for Research on the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Age and the Enlightenment (IRCL, UMR 5186) in Montpellier and the LARCA in Paris – which has since become ECHELLES (UMR 8264). The first event, entitled “Consent, refuse, surrender during the English Restoration / Consentir, refuser, céder à la Restauration”, took place on 14 June 2024 and was hosted by the Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry. We continued the discussions with a second conference at Université Paris Cité, on 5 September 2025, called “Things unsaid, things unwritten / Le Non-dit”, with a focus on the same time period (1660-1714). The two events were designed as a diptych to explore, across various disciplinary fields, issues of public and private policing of consent, as well as the moral dilemmas and counter-strategies emerging in situations of power imbalance.
- 1 This is our translation of the following: “1° L’article 222-22 est ainsi modifié : a) Au premier al (...)
2On 6 November 2025, not long after the second conference, the French National Assembly approved a revision of the legal definition of sexual assault, turning it from “any sexual assault committed through violence, coercion, threat or surprise” to “any non-consensual sexual act committed on the body of another individual or that of the perpetrator” (France, Assemblée nationale et Sénat).1 The introduction of the notion of consent, and, crucially, the increased visibility granted to its absence, was applauded by politicians, jurists and feminist non-profit organisations. Several within the latter category have nonetheless expressed doubt, at times even hostility towards this change, arguing that, instead of perpetrators being held accountable for their failure to verify the presence of consent, the burden of proving its absence now fell on the victims of sexual violence (“Tribune Collective Justice”). Feminist writer Clara Serra articulates this criticism by explaining that, while expressing consent should imply the display of recognisable and unambiguous signs, in practice, broader patriarchal power relations sabotage the very possibility of successful sexual communication (Serra 32). Who, then, gets to decide what constitutes acceptable “signs of consent”, and what expressions, gestures and practices are required to dissipate ambiguity?
3While the absence of consent appears more conspicuous, and more damaging than its presence, the notion of something being “unsaid” (our chosen translation for the French “non-dit”) is rather the conspicuous trace of something being absent, incomplete, or expressed in ways that, on the one hand, can hold the promise of initiation and selective kinship, but on the other, are greatly vulnerable to distortion. Given the precarious conditions framing the exegesis of signs of consent, it remains to be seen whether this recent legal change will bring about meaningful and durable progress in the fight against sexual violence.
4In what ways do these tensions run through Restoration texts? Is consent a concept that is only thought about when threatened, that is only really called upon when absent? How are such oxymoronic expressions as “forced consent” or “voluntary servitude” to be negotiated? How do contemporary discussions present situations where consent is refused, yet this refusal goes unsaid –or unacknowledged? How is feminine refusal represented outside the convenient framing of it as a performance to preserve modesty from the expression of authentic desire? And what about consent denied after the facts? Finally, how are these concepts articulated in imperial contexts? These are the questions we sought to address in our conferences and in the present issue.
5With the idea of consent made legible by signs comes the understanding of consent as a performance, with all its attendant political, ideological and sexual anxieties. In fact, acting and consent appear consistently linked. In 2017, the #MeToo movement, which triggered sister campaigns across many professional, cultural and institutional fields, originated in the performance industry, with mostly US-based actresses calling out systemic sexual violence in cinema. Moving backwards from 2010s Hollywood, we argue that early modern studies can shed light on discussions surrounding the idea of consent as inherently performative, and the difficulties that come with such a framing.
6“Seduction narratives”, to use a deliberately vague term, are famously ubiquitous in Restoration stage productions. Questions of courtship, of marriage, of sexual violence, of seduction and its deceits (with either lucky or disastrous outcomes) form the backbone of most plots, both comic and tragic. The discussion of the spectrum of consent, its limits and its paradoxes, also takes many forms: to consent or not to marriage, to consent or not to parental rule, to consent or not to sex. Intercourse under false identities, brides and grooms being led reluctantly to the altar, or the threateningly precarious reformation of rakish figures are thus all recurring plot devices of Restoration theatre.
7Anne Leah Greenfield, studying depictions of sexual violence on the Restoration and early eighteenth-century stages, remarks on both their ubiquity and their “astonishing flexibility” (Greenfield 2-3). She further notes that the visual languages of consensual and non-consensual sexual acts were virtually indistinguishable on the Restoration stage, being both signalled by recurring motifs such as “loose hair”, “bound women, phallic stakes and posts, torn apparel and revealed white bosoms” (59-60). Yet the blurring of non-verbal signs of sexual consent (or lack thereof) is but one expression of Restoration theatre’s complex exploration and display of female agency. In this issue, Mathilde Alazraki’s essay “Silent outrage: Dryden’s answer to his female audience following the representation of Aureng-Zebe (1676)” illustrates such complexity. Challenging traditional conceptions of the play as politically topical, Alazraki steps offstage and focuses instead on its paratext as the site of literary and gendered conflicts. The playwright’s address “To the Fair Ladies” is thus envisioned as an attempt to quieten criticism of the play’s female characters by some of its female spectators. Dryden’s ostensible inclusion of female spectators’ opinions is thus analysed as effective silencing.
8Consent is always directed outwards: it consists in exterior signs that connect one individual to others. Geneviève Fraisse thus envisions consent as a collective rather than individual act, a “falling into agreement” (“un ‘tomber d’accord’” 86) or a communal, sympathetic experience (“sentir en commun” 27). From this it follows that one individual’s methods for expressing consent, for attempting to enter into the mutual agreement and to “feel together”, has to be subjected to communal approval, established alongside cultural, ideological and spiritual norms. In her contribution “‘What he cannot express with words, he can declare by signs’: Deafness, consent and speech in Restoration England”, Rosamund Oates illustrates, through the matrimonial experiences of pre-lingually deaf individuals the private conflicts and institutional limitations surrounding “alternative” means of communicating consent. Oates’ essay demonstrates that, when words cannot be used, consent relies on non-verbal, “unsaid” performances that are expected to signify, but crucially rely on the community accepting, refusing or challenging their signification.
9Investigations into non-fictional textual productions such as legal documents, newspapers, conduct books or personal memoirs reveal how the ideological anxieties around consent and its signs shaped both public affairs and private lives. The term “patriarchy” itself took off with Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, completed shortly before the English Civil War but published only in 1680. Filmer’s perspective on the nature of power envisions the father’s authority over the family as mimicking the monarch’s authority over its subjects, and vice-versa: the question of the consent of the ruled to the rule is ostentatiously evacuated. Filmer’s view did not go uncontested. In theory as well as in practice, the question of the “natural” vs “contractual” relationship between individuals and royal authority was heavily disputed during the Restoration.
- 2 This metaphor was commonplace, and can be found reflected, for example, in Dryden's and in Davenant (...)
10When Charles returned to the throne, for example, popular celebrations were interpreted as a sign that the people consented to Stuart rule, and were compared to the natural impulse of a wife welcoming back her beloved husband.2 At the same time, the ostentatious nature of this performance was paradoxically the sign that Stuart authority no longer went without saying. God’s sanction was not enough: exhibiting the people’s assent through controversially “spontaneous” celebrations was now also necessary. Emmanuel Lemée’s perspective on this question, entitled “The end of the Restoration consensus: staging consent and its limits during the Exclusion Crisis”, nuances the representation of Charles II as a politically inept monarch. On the contrary, Lemée shows how, in a context of heightened tensions between Crown and Parliament, the king consciously used consent-as-performance as a tool of political strategy. Lemée’s contribution shows that, when consent is too precarious to remain tacit, it needs to be verbalised and enacted, which might paradoxically confer it an artificial quality leading to suspicions of dishonesty and coercion. Even observable signs of consent can be contested or bypassed if they are deemed insincere, which casts doubt on their legitimacy. In the 1670s, the Test Acts further fostered anxieties about consent being performative and not reflecting the true heart of the formally consenting subject. Such are the paradoxes that structure the notions of consent and refusal: both personal and relational actions, intimate affirmations of individual will, yet never separated from the power dynamics that frame them.
11While performances of consent were used as a way of maintaining the precarious balance of the Restoration settlement, coercion was another tool used to silence dissenting voices both during the English Revolution and the Restoration. Censorship of political news might be seen as an effective way of fostering a sense of general political consent by banning expressions of discontent. Yet this strategy of repression, Laurent Curelly argues, did not succeed in quieting the press. In his article “Silencing the press/censors during the English Revolution and the early Restoration”, Curelly, who edited this journal’s issue “Faire Silence / Modes of Silence” almost ten years ago, interrogates the rise of political news writing and the limits of censorship during the English Revolution and the early Restoration. Looking at a wide spectrum of publications, both Roundhead and Cavalier, Curelly challenges the perceived efficiency of licensing laws and explores the various strategies through which critical journalists bypassed such restrictions between the 1640s and 1660s. Outward compliance to the rule thus became less an expression of harmony and consensus than the sign that the site of debate was, precisely, a contested one.
12One of the uneasy features of consent is that it is arguably only ever summoned where trust has already fallen short. This paradox of demanding assent only to mistrust its open display is at the core of Cornelia Dahmer’s essay “‘The Bag of Secrets untied, they fly about like Birds let loose from a Cage’: The Unsaid in a Restoration Female Conduct Book–The Marquess of Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter (1688)”. Dahmer demonstrates how Halifax’s fatherly advice, one of the most influential titles of prescriptive literature throughout the Restoration and the eighteenth century, cyclically returns to female silencing and advocates self-censorship. In the same way royal authority simultaneously orders and doubts the love and loyalty of its subjects, to the private patriarch, displays of feminine virtue and filial obedience become suspicious if deemed too ostentatious.
- 3 Our translation of “la double signification du consentement: adhérer et accepter, choisir et subir” (...)
- 4 Our translation of Serra's “notre droit à décevoir”.
13At the root of those problems lies the fundamental tension which structures the notion of consent: what Geneviève Fraisse calls its double meaning, in which an invitation to opt in and to choose can turn into an injunction to accept and endure (30).3 Consent, Fraisse argues, ought to include the right to refuse, the right to choose between “yes” and “no”, what Clara Serra calls the “right to disappoint” (Fraisse 47; Serra 73).4 Both Fraisse and Serra insist that it is only possible for the subject to exercise their right to consent or not when material conditions allow them to do so. No right to consent can exist without social, legal and financial securities to safeguard it: only the tangible guarantee that “no” remains at all times a genuine option makes a “yes” meaningful. Otherwise, consent becomes indistinguishable from compliance to an already established order, and becomes but another name for obedience. Line Cottegnies’ essay “Consent and Obedience in Oroonoko” investigates Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella as the locus of a crisis of consent, enacted through a complex depiction of resistance, resignation and complicity in the face of imperial, racial and gendered oppression. It illustrates how, without the backing of the contextual safeguards pointed out by Fraisse and Serra, “consent” might mean, in practice, anything between enthusiastic approbation, resigned acceptance and coerced submission.
14This spectrum connects the question of signs with trauma studies. In her essay “The Silences of History: Writing the Execution of Charles I in Restoration Memoirs”, Claire Gheeraert-Graffeuille questions the impact of memory, and in particular traumatic memory, on the very ability to produce signs, let alone trustworthy narratives. Looking at the writings of memoirists both in favour and opposed to the regicide, Gheeraert-Graffeuille unravels the frequently clashing temporalities of legal, political and private remembrance and their impact on the process of history-writing, in part through discrepancies and meaningful silences. This study shows how trauma, in its production of equivocal signs that only faintly signify, can be understood as a category for both individual and collective narratives.
- 5 Leguil’s notion of bet (“pari”) leads her to question the logical possibility of an informed consen (...)
15Finally, the relationship between desire, individual will and consent remains a contested one. After all, even full contractual consent, be it political, social or matrimonial, is not in itself enough to protect from abuse: a work contract, for example, may very well be predatory. Even in the best of circumstances, consent precedes action, and signatories enter the contract of consent before they know precisely how it will be enforced. Clotilde Leguil thus chooses to speak of consent as a “bet”, or a leap of faith, an investment that, by essence, carries for the subject the chance of being hurt or disappointed with the outcome (33).5 Unspoken signs, however evocative, thus inevitably bring attention to their perpetually incomplete nature.
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16The editors of this issue and organisers of the conferences, Sara Leuner (Université Paris Cité), Clara Manco (Université Paris Cité) and Alice Marion-Ferrand (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry), would like to most warmly thank all of the participants to both events, as well as the members of the scientific committee: Luc Borot, Andrew Hiscock, Charles-Edouard Levillain, Florence March and Frédéric Ogée. We are extremely thankful to our keynote speakers Geneviève Fraisse (CNRS), Deborah Payne (American University) and Rosamund Oates (Manchester Metropolitan University) for accepting to join this conversation.
17We also gratefully acknowledge the unwavering support and encouragements of the Société d’Études Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, in particular its President Pierre Lurbe, and Anne Bandry-Scubbi, the general editor of this journal.
18Our work finds echoes in publications by close colleagues, such as the special issue of Cahiers Charles V co-edited in 2007 by Laëtitia Coussement-Boillot and Christine Sukic, “Silent Rhetoric”, “Dumb Eloquence”: The Rhetoric of Silence in Early Modern Literature. Precious insight was also found in discussions led at the conferences “Staging Silence from Antiquity to the Renaissance” (Cambridge, July 2025) and “Théâtre de la sidération” (Reims, November 2025). It meets the preoccupations of ANR ConSent and its conference “Analyser les langages du consentement” (Lyon, November 2025), as well as those of the project Avisa (“Historiciser le harcèlement sexuel”).
19We have also been inspired throughout this intellectual journey by the work of charities and feminist organisations such as Consentis, Hands Away, CLASCHES and Sexe et Consentement. We believe this dialogue between past and present to be a fruitful and necessary one, including in the challenges it brings.