Anne Clifford's Great Books of Record ed. by Jessica L. Malay (review)

Most early modern scholars are by now familiar with the formidable Anne Clifford. In general, that familiarity stems from her fascinating and relatively easily accessible early diary, which covers the years 1616–19, when the young Anne Clifford (born in 1590) was married to Richard Sackville, Earl of Dorset, and engaged in a fierce battle to inherit the estates and titles of her father, George Clifford, in the North of England. Thanks to the excellent edition of this diary by Katherine O. Acheson, students as well as scholars have been captivated by scenes like Clifford's defiant meeting with King James in 1617, as he attempted to bully her into renouncing her claims. Clifford had to wait until 1643 before she achieved her goal, which in essence occurred because she outlived her uncle and cousin. She left behind her second husband, Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, in London and from 1649 until her death in 1676 lived in her beloved Westmorland, restoring her castles and houses, and memorializing herself and her family. This process of consolidation involved Clifford in the amassing of an enormous amount of written evidence about her family history and genealogy, from the present back to the far distant origins of her family tree, as well as material relating to her more immediate family, her own life, and to legal and social precedents which would bolster her claim to her estates and titles.

The political implications of Clifford's agenda and her archive have been explored through some scintillating scholarship in recent years: I am thinking in particular of work done by Mary Ellen Lamb, Mihoko Suzuki, Susan Wiseman, Anne Myers, and Julie Crawford. However, access to the archival material that informed much of this work has been difficult. Some of this material exists in George C. Williamson's obscure Lady Anne Clifford (1922), some in Richard T. Spence's excellent biography (1997), and some in the handy but unscholarly Diaries of Anne Clifford edited by D. J. H. Clifford (1990). The archive, which consists of three sets of what Clifford herself termed her Great Books, each set comprising three volumes, is housed in the Cumbrian Records Office at Kendal. The Records Office initially held two sets of Great Books, but was able to purchase the third set in 2004. As someone who has had the privilege of spending a week in the Records Office working on the Great Books, I was, I confess, astonished when I heard that Jessica Malay was planning an edition of them.

The volumes are massive, the material is dense and complex, and the texts are arranged and re-arranged, annotated and re-annotated by Clifford in a process that means that each set is unique. The idea that a printed scholarly edition could be produced from this material seemed to me to be absurd. And yet, here Malay's edition is, all one thousand pages of it, delivered on time and a product of scrupulous scholarship.

The Great Books are not actually books as we might understand books to be, nor are they diaries, though they contain diary material. They are multi-genre compendia of material assembled by Clifford over many years and include elaborate family histories, genealogies and family trees, biographical sketches, autobiography, reproductions of archival material relevant to Clifford's legal cases, and a kind of summary diary for the years from 1650 to 1675. The Great Books are compilations, usually written out by a series of secretaries or scribes, but annotated by Clifford, at times in her own hand, and at times through the scribal insertion of new material. The Great Books are therefore something of a palimpsest, as the passage of time induces Clifford to reread, expand, and correct earlier material (the most vivid example is the way she inserts deaths and births into family trees). The Great Books are also part of Clifford's obsessive memorializing process that includes buildings...