Along with colleagues on the AHRC-funded project ‘Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe’ (1), I have spent the last year or so working towards a new exhibition at the wonderful Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire. The exhibition, titled ‘Virtue and Vice’, opened in mid-April 2013, and has been well received by visitors — especially those lucky enough to visit on Saturday 13th April to experience a surprise quartet singing in the High Great Chamber!
The exhibition has a number of key aims. We want to remind people of how profoundly the religious and political changes of the 1500s shaped the lives of women and men in England, and to shed new light on the multiple points of contact – both intellectual and material – between England, Europe, and the rest of the world. Finally, in a strand drawing heavily on my own research, and which speaks most directly to members of the Women’s History Network, we want to challenge people’s assumptions about women’s lives in early modern England and beyond.
Hardwick Hall is a wonderful venue at which to contest the orthodoxy that women in the early modern period were ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’, to quote a now well-worn critical formula. Hardwick Hall was built by the redoubtable Elizabeth Shrewsbury, better known as Bess of Hardwick, who proclaimed her ownership and achievement by topping each of its four towers with her initials, those then mounted with a countess’s coronet.
Bess’s history is a fascinating one, and more light is being shed on it by the Bess of Hardwick letters project run by Alison Wiggins at the University of Glasgow. (2)
Bess of Hardwick ©NT/Angelo Hornak
This portrait, painted by an anonymous artist in the 1550s, shows Bess at around the age of 30. The exhibition highlights the French and Spanish influences in Bess’s elaborate clothing. ©NT/Angelo Hornak.
Bess’s very exceptionality, however, presents an unexpected challenge. Visitors to Hardwick are entranced by Bess’s story, but often encouraged to believe that she was unusual – perhaps even unique – in a period in which most women could not own property, assert their own rights, or enter into political and cultural life. By interweaving Bess’s story with crucial details from the lives and activities of other early modern women, our exhibition suggests that Bess was exceptional more in the scale of her success than in her status as a determined and astute operator within shifting social and cultural constraints.
Two gripping stories are those of Mary, Queen of Scots, held prisoner by Elizabeth I (Bess’s friend and patron), kept under the stewardship of Bess’s fourth husband, George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, and moved frequently between his many properties, and Arbella Stuart, Bess’s granddaughter, in line for the throne, and caught amidst conspiracies and plots to establish her as a Catholic queen. Yet we also wish to highlight moments from the lives of less visible, but equally resourceful, women: Jacqueline Vautrollier, for example, wife of the Huguenot refugee printer, Thomas Vautrollier, who ran the printing business when her husband was away from London, and again after his death. We consider too the domestic and professional clothworkers who made the materials which went into the magnificent hangings and tapestries brought together at Hardwick.
Catechism ©NT/Robert Thrift
This little book, printed by Thomas Vautrollier, was found behind the dining room panelling at Hardwick Hall in 2003. It is a French catechism: a vivid reminder of women’s crucial role in religious education within the home.
The exhibition highlights the way in which early modern women appropriated popular religious orthodoxies and stories in order to reflect upon and articulate their own experiences. By tracing the ways in which women, including Bess, stitched versions of these stories, we also want to argue for the importance of the decorative arts – too often dismissed as constrained, ‘feminine’ practices, within our broader cultural heritage. At the same time, however, I have tried to incorporate some of my current research, which emphasises the extent of women’s influence on household religion (extending out across the estate at grand houses like Hardwick) and the extent to which contemporary commentators recognised and celebrated women’s ability to affect religious (and hence political) change. Finally, the exhibition reflects upon women’s reading in early modern England. We know little about Bess’s reading – famously her 1601 inventories list only six books – but by drawing together the varied evidence of how women read, as well as where and what, we are able to suggest the importance of literate practice to a growing number of women during the English Renaissance.
Helen Smith (c) April 2013
Helen Smith is Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of York. She is author of ‘Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2012), and co-director of the AHRC-funded project, ‘Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe’. She is currently working on a book-length project investigating ‘The matter of early modernity’.
1. www.york.ac.uk/conversion (accessed 14 April 2013).
2. http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/fundedresearchprojects/bessofhardwick/ (accessed 14 April 2013).
Find out more about the exhibition http://europeanconversionnarratives.wordpress.com/tag/hardwick-hall/ Download 'Virtue and Vice' app for android phones https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rustymonkey.virtueandvice (version for iphones soon available)
