Prescription, culture, and shaping identity: Lady Sarah Cowper (1644-1720).

Abstract

This thesis is the study of a 2,300-page diary spanning the period 1700 to 1716 in which an English gentlewoman explicitly and self-consciously made the connection between prescription and practice as she interacted with contemporary ideology to construct domestic, public, and intellectual identities. In response to her contentious family relationships and insecure social standing, Lady Sarah Cowper subverted prescriptive texts in order to justify and validate her presentation of herself as a wife, mother, mistress of servants, member of the gentry, and pious Christian. Within the household, Lady Sarah manipulated the ideals of wifeliness and motherhood to claim authority in opposition to her husband, while outside the home she made visiting, churchgoing, charity and patronage into means of social empowerment, focusing especially on cultivating contacts with the highest-ranking members of the English clergy. Intellectually, Lady Sarah translated her extensive religious reading into the formation of personalized Anglicanism that typified many contemporary trends in theology, and her informed observance of current events into an individualized political stance that reflected her connections with the governing elite through her son William, Lord Chancellor Cowper, and her reactions to the most charged party issues of the day, especially the trial of Dr. Sacheverell in 1710. In bringing to life this unique, exceptionally articulate, and previously-neglected source, this thesis casts important light on gender relations, politics, social life and aging in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England.