English noblewomen and the organization of space: Gardens, mourning posts, and religious recesses

The noblewoman of early modern England occupied a paradoxical space. She was both at the center of power, due to her status, and at the margins, because of her gender. Her role in the household exemplified contradictions of authority and submission, spiritual equality and practical subordination. I argue that aristocratic English women fashioned spaces in the home and surrounding landscape that allowed them to reinforce and/or rewrite the prevailing idea of the feminine, inwardness, and the boundaries of public and private areas, even if in only a small way. My dissertation explores and maps how noblewomen appropriated or were appropriated by three spaces: gardens, sites of mourning, and private devotion. The purpose of analyzing the material and mental expanse of the garden is to open the landscape to the geography of gender. Specifically, I examine representations of landscape in “The Description of Cooke-ham,” the entertainment for Queen Elizabeth at Bisham Abbey, and The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. In the exploration of mourning, I concentrate on two particular and exceptional noblewomen, Lady Anne Clifford and Lady Elizabeth Russell. Examining their works of commemoration shows how mourning and attendant grief practices gave some women a sanctioned creative outlet, and the opportunity to shape space and self. The final chapter investigates the implications of privacy for women in devotion. Embedded in mainstream culture, the space of private devotion was also a site of alterity. Religious women poets wrote private devotion as a space of power, a relational space of self and other. The mapping done on these three spaces necessitates inter-disciplinary work as I examine various texts and objects of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—such as poetry, prose, architectural plans, and monuments—and draw upon the work of geographers, historians, literary critics, and others. What these spaces reveal is that in her ability to affect the lives of those around her and to produce a complexity of spaces, the noblewoman was both a powerful agent and a powerfully desiring subject.