Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory

by Ann Rosalind Jones , Peter Stallybrass

• ISBN13: 9780521786638
• ISBN10: 0521786630
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-02-12
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

During the late sixteenth century 'fashion' first took on the sense of restless change in contrast to the older sense of fashioning or making. As fashionings, clothes were perceived as material forms of personal and social identity which made the man or woman. In Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory Jones and Stallybrass argue that the making and transmission of fabrics and clothing were central to the making of Renaissance culture. Their examination explores the role of clothes as forms of memory transmitted from master to servant, from friend to friend, from lover to lover. This book offers a close reading of literary texts, paintings, textiles, theatrical documents, and ephemera to reveal how clothing and textiles were crucial to the making and unmaking of concepts of status, gender, sexuality, and religion in the Renaissance. The book is illustrated with a wide range of images from portraits to embroidery.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	viii
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: fashion, fetishism, and memory in early modern England and Europe	1	(14)
Part 1 Material subjects	15	(72)
The currency of clothing	17	(17)
Composing the subject: making portraits	34	(25)
Yellow starch: fabrications of the Jacobean court	59	(28)
Part 2 Gendered habits	87	(86)
Arachne's web: Velazquez's Las Hilanderas	89	(15)
The fate of spinning: Penelope and the Three Fates	104	(30)
The needle and the pen: needlework and the appropriation of printed texts	134	(39)
Part 3 Staging clothes	173	(96)
The circulation of clothes and the making of the English theater	175	(32)
Transvestism and the ``body beneath'': speculating on the boy actor	207	(13)
(In)alienable possessions: Griselda, clothing, and the exchange of women	220	(25)
Of ghosts and garments: the materiality of memory on the Renaissance stage	245	(24)
Conclusion: the end(s) of livery	269	(9)
Notes	278	(51)
Bibliography	329	(26)
Index	355