Kari Boyd McBride, Country House Discourse in Early Modern
England: A cultural study of landscape and legitimacy (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2001), vii+191 pp.
‘Country house discourse […] provided the script, set, and cast for the
performance of legitimacy’, Kari Boyd McBride writes in her new study
of the country house, its origins, architecture, literary representations and
visual simulacra in early modern England. McBride defines her field
broadly, focusing not only on the country house poem but on ‘everything
from the polemic of protest, to “descriptions” of England, to paintings, to
architectural plans, to proscriptive literature’. She ranges through late
sixteenth-century antiquarian surveys of land and genealogy, records of
numerous country houses, well- and lesser-known country house poems,
and visual representations.
McBride’s opening chapter emphasises country house discourse’s
performative nature; drawing on Judith Butler, she insists that ‘one “did”
nobility’, and that this enactment took place through country house
discourse. Her definition of an aristocracy comprising the nobility and
gentry is telling: she depicts a country house-owning class whose
controlling interests were shared by those immediately below them, and
which was in any case increasingly permeable in the period. McBride
focuses on change and transition, country house discourse mediating ‘the
renegotiation of social and economic relationships’, frequently through
the articulation of modes of power, legitimacy and authority that were
always already out of step with social realities.
Tracing the ‘dissolution of legitimacy’ and hospitality with the
Dissolution of the monasteries and land enclosure in the sixteenth
century, McBride examines the antiquarian surveys of Sir Thomas Smith
(De Republica Anglorum, 1583) and William Harrison (Description of
England, 1577, 1587). She sees them fitting the new to the old order and
establishing continuity for it with ‘a suitable historic past’, thereby
accommodating the social changes that threatened the cultural mythos of
legitimacy. The continued evocation of a disappearing cultural mythos is
also the theme which defines her analysis of country house architecture.
While the Great Hall ceased to be the hub of aristocratic life and
hospitality in the period, it remained the dominant architectural space in
the neo-medieval design of Elizabethan ‘prodigy houses’.
McBride counterpoises traditionalist country house architecture
and ideology with the ownership and governance of two extraordinary
ladies, Bess of Hardwick (at Hardwick Hall) and Anne Clifford (in the
north of England). Each used country house discourse to express their
own female authority, and McBride’s discussion of the country house
poem similarly explores articulations that both subscribe to and subtly re-
write the forms of legitimacy that country house discourse enacts.
Readings of ‘To Penshurst’ and Aemilia Lanyer’s increasing canonical
‘Description of Cooke-ham’ run alongside commentaries on several
lesser-known country house poems. Simulacra—paintings of country
houses, their inhabitants and furnishings—are McBride’s focus in her
final chapter as, towards the end of the seventeenth-century, family
wealth was increasingly urban and imperial in its sources, but the country
house remained irreplaceable as a sign of status and legitimacy.
McBride’s survey locates country house discourse in precise, everchanging historical moments, between the Dissolution and the economic
revolution of the seventeenth century. That she extensively illuminates
the role and experience of women and of black slaves and servants, new
arrivals in the country houses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, is
just one invaluable facet of this book. She synthesises diverse bodies of
social history and theory, and recent work on gender, race and class,
moving skillfully between them to reveal new aspects of conventional
and subversive articulations. Set alongside older discussions of the
country house, McBride’s book is an outstanding contribution to the
fields of early modern cultural poetics and social semiotics.
Sarah Ross
University of Warwick