HICKS, Carola 1941-

PERSONAL: Born 1941. Education: M.A., Ph.D., F.S.A.

ADDRESSES: Office—Newnham College, Cambridge CB3 9DF, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Scholar, educator, and author. Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge, England, staff tutor in art history; fellow of Newnham College.

WRITINGS:

(Editor) England in the Eleventh Century, Paul Watkins (Stamford, England), 1992.

Animals in Early Medieval Art, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1993.

Cambridgeshire Churches, Paul Watkins (Stamford, Englad), 1997.

Discovering Stained Glass, Shire Publications Ltd. (Princes Risborough, England), 1996.

Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk, Macmillan (London, England), 2001; published as Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of an Earlier Lady Diana Spencer, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Carola Hicks is the editor of England in the Eleventh Century, a collection of twenty interdisciplinary essays divided into four categories: government and society, the church, image and text, and the English language. She also edited Cambridgeshire Churches whose first part surveys church architecture from anglo-saxon to modern times. While the second part studies church decoration and contents.

Animals in Early Medieval Art examines the use of animal ornament in medieval art from the sixth to the eleventh centuries. Hicks considers animal motifs in sculpture, manuscripts, embroidery, and metalwork, including such masterpieces as the Book of Kells, the Sutton Hoo treasure, the Bayeaux Tapestry, St. Ninian's Hoard, and Pictish and Irish stonework. As Hicks notes, these artworks were influenced by Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean elements—a combination that led to a tradition of animal art that was stronger in the British Isles than anywhere else in Europe. Extrapolating from this art, Hicks also discusses the transmission of myths and images through societies and time.

In Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk, Hicks describes the life of Lady Diana Beauclerk, an aristocrat who became a successful and respected artist following a notorious divorce. Lady Beauclerk marries her lover and moves from the restrictions of life at court into London's cultural circles. In the Times Literary Supplement, Kevin Sharpe wrote, "Hicks's biography opens up a different life and world, one in which an aristocratic woman could make a respectable reputation as an artist and in which [after a scandalous affair] . . . [she] could effect a partial return from social exile."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Choice, July-August, 1996, review of Animals in Early Medieval Art, p. 1783.

English Historical Review, November, 1995, B. C. Barker-Benfield, review of England in the Eleventh Century, p. 1232; February, 2002, Leslie Mitchell, review of Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk, p. 200.

Speculum, January, 1998, Douglas MacLean, review of Animals in Early Medieval Art, p. 185.

Times Literary Supplement, November 23, 2001, Kevin Sharpe, "The Rehabilitation of Lady Di," p. 19.