‘Material Manoeuvres: Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and the Power of Artefacts,’ Art History, 32:3 (June 2009), pp. 485-515.

Pointon, Marcia ‘Material Manoeuvres: Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and the Power of Artefacts,’ Art History, 32:3 (June 2009), pp. 485-515.

Abstract

This article focuses on artefacts that played an important part in the life of Sarah Churchill, first Duchess of Marlborough’: the jewels she amassed, the Turkish tent that her husband the Duke of Marlborough had used on the battlefield, and a sculpture of Queen Anne that she erected at Blenheim. While the life of this supremely powerful woman and her role in the construction of Blenheim Palace, has been extensively explored by historians, nobody had hitherto paid any attention to her acquisition and deployment of things. Drawing on a wide range of manuscript and contemporary sources from her own correspondence and contemporary biographies to caricature, Pointon examines how an elite woman of immense wealth, but little formal education, strategically employed material things to exert influence socially and politically. The author made a special journey to Berlin to see a surviving Turkish campaign tent. The article situates Marlborough through her universally acknowledged achievements, and in relation to the difference between her and others of her class and era who attained independent reputations as successful women. The article examines how material things played a part in unconventional forms of communication and in the exercise of power. It is highly significant in that it bridges studies in material culture, seventeenth-century British political history, and popular culture. This is a period and topic relatively neglected by historians of British art. The research benefited from time spent in 2007 as Senior Research Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art and as a Visiting Fellow at the Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT. It was first presented at the conference ‘Brilliant Women: Gender, Intellect and Representation in Eighteenth-century Britain’, National Portrait Gallery, London (25-26.04.2008).

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