Commemorating Lady Anne Clifford’s Hospitality: Bishop Rainbowe’s 1676 Funeral Sermon

• In Event: Renaissance Commemoration III: Spaces of Memory

Abstract

The redoubtable Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery, is best known for her legal battle to inherit her family estates and her eventual claim and single-handed governance of her ancestral lands in the 1640s. Far less known is Bishop Rainbowe’s commemorative funeral sermon, delivered at Clifford’s interment on April 14th, 1676, and published in 1677. Lauding her “freedom of ... Hospitality,” Rainbowe presents Clifford as an example for women and men alike, her generous household management balanced by her parsimonious self-care. In examining the sermon alongside other Commonwealth and Restoration commemorations of hospitable practice, I hope to answer questions such as: What is the relationship between the discourses of hospitality and commemoration? What role does the nostalgic evocation of feudal hospitality play in Restoration England? How do women figure in upholding an imagined past?

Author

• Madeline J. Bassnett, University of Western Ontario