Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage: Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford, and Aemilia Lanyer

Abstract

This chapter focuses on texts by two noble ladies and a gentlewoman in decline in Jacobean England; and that limitation obviously precludes drawing general conclusions about women of other/even the same ranks in Jacobean society. Margaret Clifford and Aemilia Lanyer may comprise the first English example of female patron and literary client, and that relationship is at the centre of Lanyer’s volume of poems, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum , published in 1611. Anne Clifford’s memoirs of 1653 represent her as a strong-minded, self-assured woman with a firm sense of personal worth, sitting in confident authorial judgement on all the men who held familial authority over her — father, uncle, husbands — and penning perceptive, fairminded, and judicious evaluations of them. Reinforcing Anne’s sense of a matrilineal heritage was her belief in her mother’s prophetic powers and prayers, her delight in tracing uncanny parallels between her mother’s life and own, and her frequent descriptions of her own daughter as near-replica of Margaret.

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