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Material Manoeuvres: Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough and the Power of Artefacts

The article examines how material things played a part in unconventional forms of communication and in the exercise of power by a woman who attained great wealth and political influence; 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. The research was first presented at the conference ‘Brilliant Women: Gender, Intellect and Representation in Eighteenth-century Britain’, National Portrait Gallery, London (25 to 26 April 2008). While this article relates to Pointon’s research interests in material culture and especially in the material culture of jewellery, none of the material published here appears elsewhere in Pointon's work.