ABSTRACT
In her study of women and property in early modern England, Amy Louise Erikson describes Anne Clifford as the protagonist of the most publicized and celebrated marital property dispute of the seventeenth century. Clifford’s repeated biblical references—most notably to the Psalms—both in her mother’s narrative and in the account of her own life that immediately follows it announces the providential nature of this history. She recounts more than once that her father foretold on his deathbed that his titles would eventually revert to her and also that her mother had a prophetic dream during her pregnancy that Anne would be the heir even though her two brothers were still living. Thus Clifford overturns the traditional gendering of history as masculine and the obstacles to the historical process as feminine, to represent her mother. Clifford’s various monuments demonstrate her interest in the authorship of another kind of history that commemorates and constructs the identities of those she intended to celebrate.
