Karen Hearn & Lynn Hulse (ed.). Lady Anne Clifford: culture, patronage and gender in 17th-century Britain.

Wilson, Jean

KAREN HEARN & LYNN HULSE (ed.). Lady Anne Clifford: culture, patronage and gender in 17th-century Britain (Yorkshire Archaeological Society Occasional Paper 7). viii+139 pages, 106 b&w & colour illustrations. 2009. Leeds: Yorkshire Archaeological Society; 1-9035-6475-1 paperback 20 [pounds sterling] + p&p. Lady Anne Clifford, daughter of one earl and wife of two, knew Elizabeth I and died in the reign of Charles II. For the last thirty years of her life she owned most of north-west England. This was a hard-won inheritance: when her father, the third earl of Cumberland, died in 1605, she was a rich heiress, but he had bequeathed the major part of the unentailed estates to his brother and successor, to pass down the male line. It was not until after the death of her cousin, the fifth earl, in 1643 that Lady Anne inherited what she had always regarded and fought for as her own, and she held it knowing that she would be the last Clifford to do so: according to common law heiresses share equally and the estate would be divided between the lines of her two daughters.

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Lady Anne's life is exceptionally well-documented by herself and by those who knew her. She also marked her life out materially, in architecture, monuments, artefacts and the two 'Great Pictures', triptychs painted for the great halls of Appleby and Skipton castles, in Cumbria and Yorkshire, the dual centres of her inheritance. These triptychs project a visual and textual autobiography, tracing her descent, the formative influences on her character and her life, through portraits of herself as a teenager and as a matron, her parents, her siblings, her aunts, her tutors and her husbands, all explained by extensive captions.

The book under review derives from a one-day conference held at Tate Britain in 2004 when the surviving Great Picture (from Appleby) was on loan there. Karen Hearne gives a detailed exposition of the Great Picture, including its physical structure, likely authorship, probable date of commission and various visual elements. She also examines the evidence for what the vanished Skipton triptych looked like, although since Lady Anne, knowing her inheritance would be divided, must always have intended that there should be two triptychs, there cannot have been much difference. Elizabeth V. Chew's exploration of Lady Anne's relationship to the 'World of Goods' could have been enlightening, but suffers from the author's limited appreciation of seventeenth-century English conditions, although she does make the point that Lady Anne seems to have been a collector of curiosities, a hitherto-overlooked aspect of her life.

Adam White provides a thorough and scholarly survey of Lady Anne's activities as a patron of funerary monuments, and John Goodall of her architectural activities. Goodall argues that the distinction made by modern architectural historians between the classicism of Inigo Jones and the medievalising of someone like Lady Anne may be a false one, granted that many medieval structures were believed to be of Roman origin. It is a pity that outwith the Countess' Pillar, her activities as an erector of non-funerary monuments in Cumbria (such as the Lady's Pillar at Mallerstang) is given little attention: this might have further strengthened Goodall's argument and provided a valuable link between his and White's papers.

These papers dealing with Lady Anne and material culture are followed by four taking as their starting points aspects of the Great Picture. Lynn Hulse writes about Lady Anne and music, Heidi Brayman Hackel considers Lady Anne as a book collector and annotator, while Stephen Orgel's complementary paper examines her annotations in one of her books, a copy of the 1610 edition of the Elizabethan classic, A Mirovr for Magistrates.

The chapter which, along with Goodall's contribution, provides the high point of a generally good collection is Katherine Acheson's rather misleadingly titled 'Lady Anne Clifford's Writing Style'. Firmly grounded in (beautifully expounded) literary theory, this culminates in a discussion of the inscriptions in the Great Picture, which she relates to the emblem tradition, but chooses to designate 'complementary text', a coinage which is helpful both here and when extended to other contemporary forms which combine visual and textual elements, such as funerary monuments. This is also the paper which brings out most clearly the attractiveness and fascination of Lady Anne, which make her such a delightful subject: Acheson avoids the common trap of theorists: a lack of appreciation that the object of theory is also a person. The cross-disciplinary approach of the book is welcome: the Yorkshire Archaeological Society is to be congratulated on including it in its Occasional Papers series. A more stringent editorial approach would have reduced repetition of the facts of Lady Anne's life; reproduction of the illustrations is sometimes poor, most disappointingly in the case of the Great Picture, which is muddy and at a small scale. That said, this is a valuable addition to scholarship on Lady Anne Clifford: Goodall's and Acheson's studies will also be fascinating and stimulating to all who study early modern material culture.

JEAN WILSON

Department of English, Boston University, USA and Harlton, Cambridge, UK (Email: jlw29@cam.ac.uk)