Until relatively recently the study of dress in the past confined itself to explorations of changing styles and material composition, and histories of production and consumption. Examination of clothing’s social and cultural meanings in historical context, and in parti- cular their significance in the formation of embodied identities, emerged in the wake of sociological studies from the 1980s on, but are still relatively under-explored compared to other histories of the body and sexual identities. This chapter briefly examines the approaches to the subject taken by other scholars to date, and then turns to map some of the relationships between clothing and the body in early modernity: the importance of garments to good health, the intimate involvement of cloth and clothing in the experience of maturation and bodily transition, and the role of dress in the understanding and per- formance of gender. While the examples used here are primarily English, the map may equally be employed to navigate the conceptual terrain of other early modern societies in Europe, for while the specifics of fashion varied across borders, underlying dress practices and ways of conceptualizing the clothed – and unclothed – body reached over regional, political and religious divides.
The relatively recent appearance of dress within History belies an intellectual tradition that in Europe stretches back to the latter part of the sixteenth century and the appearance of illustrated costume books.1The discovery of the New World, a growing impulse towards
the encyclopedic categorization of knowledge, and a fascination with the ancient, the unusual and the exotic, all combined to fuel the popularity of this new genre: costume books ‘took their place in the gallery of marvels of nature and prodigies of human crea- tion’.2Beginning with Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi, et Moderni di Tutto il Mondo of 1598,
some of these texts also included examples of historical dress.3 Right from the start then,
an antiquarian impulse established itself in relation to costume studies, and would prove to be of major importance.4From the seventeenth century onwards the researches of indivi-
dual antiquaries not only constituted the field of knowledge, but the methodological approaches of future generations. Thanks to antiquaries who worked as engravers and painters, in time a link was also forged between costume studies and art. In the nineteenth century history painters in particular turned to published surveys of dress, evidencing a new desire for authenticity in historical recreation that was apparent also on the stage and which created an enduring association between costume studies, the theatre, and, more latterly, film and television. Interest in dress carried through into the twentieth century
with unabated vigour,5and in the new millennium the republication of Cesare Vecellio’s
sixteenth-century costume book that over 400 years ago started the whole ball rolling, illustrates thefield’s astonishing longevity and continuing appeal.
Costume study thus forms an unbroken tradition, remarkable for its consistency of con- tent and form. It was not a tradition, however, that found any favour within the newly developing profession of History, and in Anglophone scholarship particularly it was many years before the study of clothing found its way into History departments in any capacity at all. Under the influence of the Annales school, French historians were open earlier to the idea of dress forming an area of valid research, Fernand Braudel being one of thefirst to urge its significance, and Daniel Roche following with his masterful treatment of the clothing practices of the Ancien Régime.6 Meanwhile in England, understandably given its
long-held links with drawing and painting, the study of fashion within the academy instead developed with traditional art history.
There were two strands to this intellectual programme: the first dealing with repre- sentations of dress and concerned, often, with the dating of paintings; and the second, based on the study of artefacts in a museum context, dedicated to an understanding of the technological aspects of surviving garments.7In both strands of endeavour, dress has been
presented as a decorative art and with little overt interpretation. The contribution of these object-based studies, in either the form of graphic representation or as material remains, is typified by the articles in the periodical Costume, the journal of the Costume Society. Most usually these are short, descriptive discussions of specific artefacts or presentations of archival documents (transcriptions of inventories, accounts and so on), which have put valuable source material into the public domain. Although the journal deals with a wide chronology, there is much that is relevant to the early modern period, and although pri- marily English, does include material of a wider European reach. Mention must be made at this point of the exemplary work by Janet Arnold, to whose knowledge of costume artefacts and their textual remains scholars are deeply indebted.8This approach to dress in
history has therefore tended to produce scholarship of a detailed and descriptive nature.9
As the discipline has moved away from connoisseurship and aesthetics, however, more analytical studies relating to dress have also emerged.10 In line with this, Costume’s recent
change of editor seems also to be shifting the tenor of this periodical towards more analysis and a greater consideration of dress artefacts within their cultural context.
While anthropology, sociology and psychology had meanwhile all turned their attention to costume and fashion, dressfirst made its appearance in history departments in economic analyses of textile production, and then later discussions of consumption.11Textile History,
the journal of the Pasold Foundation, is a valuable site for studies of this nature. One aspect of clothing consumption of particular relevance to the period concerns the legal restraints on display and expenditure, known collectively as sumptuary laws, on which there is a substantial literature.12Studies of the cultural meanings attached to clothing, its
role in the formation of identities and relationships, and its value as a window on society in general have, however, been much slower to come forth. Only in the last decade or so has a sudden flowering of scholarship in this area occurred, and even so the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – with some notable exceptions13 – remain a period of relative
neglect when compared to the main focus on modernity. This concentration on the post- 1700 period is reinforced by the curricula of institutions that teach fashion/dress studies, which seldom stray into an earlier chronology. The most significant journal in the area, Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture, has a very wide ethnic and
geographical reach, but only infrequently ventures into early modernity. This is not a reflection of editorial policy, but of the nature of the majority of articles submitted. Even as recently as 2010 this oversight in cultural history has led to the dress and appearances of early modernity being described as a ‘hitherto neglected subject’.14 The future however
looks more promising thanks to the recent upswing in the scholarship of material culture– a nexus of interest for historians, art historians, archaeologists and museum conservators alike. Although concerned with a wider field of study, clothes and the varying practices surrounding their making, (re)use and disposal occupy a significant position.15However, to
date the biggest contribution to the discussion of the cultural significance of dress in the Renaissance, especially the relationship of clothes to embodied identity, has come from literary history. From the 1990s onwards, the politics and performance of gender and sexuality as expressed through the medium of clothing has proved a fertile ground for lit- erary studies, with challenging and transgressive practices providing a particular lure for scholarly interest. Concentrating on textual representations of dress, primarily as expressed through dramatic writing and the theatre, this scholarship has approached the topic with a relish that matches the energy of much contemporary discussion.16
Although, then, there is an extremely long tradition of interest in the‘when’ and ‘what’ of historical dress, in contrast to other disciplines the study of clothing is a relative late- comer to History, and a rare guest indeed in that branch of it concerned with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, the significance of this aspect of material culture – its relevance to issues of corporeality and sexuality under consideration in this volume – would be difficult to overestimate. While we are used to conceptualizing dress as a category that can be separate from wearers (as instanced, for example, by concepts like‘the clothing industry’ and ‘the fashion designer’), for early modernity dress was nearly always imagined in conjunction with the body.17 Garments were not retailed in mass-produced
and identical abundance, but were usually created or altered singly for individual wearers. Ownership was also relatively modest: most people had a small number of garments that were a familiar part of their social persona.18Dress was about corporeality in general, and
specific garments could conjure specific bodies. The selection of these garments was also made with regard to prevailing norms of gender, health, decency, attractiveness and phy- sical comfort. These norms, to return to the image with which we started, form a conceptual landscape to which we will now turn.
This exploration starts from the detail of a single point: a lonefigure that stands in the midst of this conceptual landscape naked. When we picture thisfigure’s nakedness, how- ever, what exactly do we see? Probably, utilizing a binary opposition between being naked and being clothed, we imagine afigure that is entirely undressed. The choice is between either being clothed with garments or being naked without: you can have one or other, but not both. Scrutiny of the early modern language of nakedness, however, shows the concept to have been a much more variable construct. Instead of hinging on revelation or con- cealment, being clothed centred about a notion of sufficiency. Being insufficiently covered or equipped was to be naked, a state that thus changed in different contexts and might describe a bodily appearance that we would consider to be dressed.19As Sarah Toulalan
has noted, even in pornographic images, what we term as nudity was depicted only infrequently, adding that in real life the complete removal of clothes was rare.20
From this understanding of nakedness we can step back for a wider view, to begin to appreciate the fundamental position of clothing in relation to the early modern body. For if being inadequately clad left one vulnerable – or ‘naked’ – the converse also applied.
Appropriate and sufficient clothing not only covered its wearers, it also sustained and protected them. Seen in this way, clothing was an ingredient in the recipe for well-being, a necessary pre-condition for welfare. Garments were not put on and cast off, but lived through, mediating an individual’s experience of the surrounding world. A healthy, safe and attractive body was a body which was clothed. In the most fundamental terms, apparel guarded its wearer from environmental influences, helping to prevent him or her from becoming too hot, too cold, or too wet. It is easy for us to shrug aside the significance of this. Partly this is because the site of temperature regulation has now to a large extent been displaced from the immediate locus of the body to the wider surroundings of place and technology. With a push of a button buildings are either heated or cooled, the laundering and drying of garments is simple and quick, abundant hot water is to be had for the mere turning on of a tap, and even the European climate is without its former extremes of cold.21 In Britain at least, this conspires to minimize the attention we pay, meteor-
ologically, to what is going on around us. As the occasional extreme weather shows, we are surprised when the climate intrudes on the comfort and easy running of our lives. In addition to such changed material and meterological circumstances, the modern medical vision has further displaced apparel’s significance for physical well-being. The humoural tradition that dominated early modern healthcare, however, was well alive to the protec- tive properties of dress. In the struggle to balance the four internal humours the environ- ment was a powerful influence, and with such external phenomena as temperature and weather profoundly affecting an individual’s humoural balance and therefore health, the manipulation of clothing to warm and cool the body was a matter of common sense.22
Garments were in fact thefirst line of defence against ill health.
What this meant in the practical day-to-day unfolding of people’s lives is best glimpsed through documents like diaries and letters. In the autumn of 1622, for example, John Winthrop (1588–1649) wrote to his 16-year-old son studying at Trinity College, Dublin: ‘You may line your gowne with some warm bayes [ … ] and if you be not allreadye in a freese Jerkin, I wishe you to gett one speedylye, and how soeuer you clothe your self when you stirre, yet be sure to keepe warme when you studye or sleepe.’23This was not an over-
protective parent unhelpfully micro-managing what should have been left well alone, but simply sound medical advice, and the consequences of ignoring it might, without exag- geration, prove fatal. ‘When he was about fourteen daies old,’ wrote gentry housewife Alice Thornton (1627–1707), ‘my pretty babe broake into red spots, like the smale pox, and through cold, gotten by thinner clothing then either my owne experience or practice did accustom to all my children.’24 This thin clothing, Alice decided, combined with
the bitter weather of an extremely cold December, caused the child to fall seriously ill. Five days later little Christopher Thornton was dead.
I have suggested elsewhere that this conceptualization of clothing led it to become a means of self-medication, a way of manipulating the humours to prevent or even cure indisposition.25 Available to all, it was an empowering strategy, being neither dependent
on specialist knowledge nor beyond the reach of those of even quite modest means. If we turn to Sir William Vaughan’s (c.1575–1641) self-help manual on health, therefore, we should not be surprised tofind discussion of apparel. The text adopts a handy question- and-answer format, a kind of FAQ for seventeenth-century readers. One of the questions runs:‘Declare vnto me a daily Diet [i.e. course of life], whereby I may liue in health, and not trouble my selfe in Physicke.’ ‘I Will’, writes Vaughan with a rhetorical flourish, before enumerating 16 points for healthy living. Two of Vaughan’s first four recommendations
involve cloth and clothing: rubbing the body with a linen cloth onfirst rising, and dressing in handsome garments appropriate to the season and comprising particular fabrics that will resist vermin and contagious airs.26 Gervase Markham, author of the domestic manual
The English Housewife, neatly summed up this relationship of garments to bodily well-being. In delineating the housewife’s duties, he wrote that she ought to clothe her family ‘out- wardly and inwardly’. Outward garments were ‘for defence from the cold and comeliness to the person’: for protection therefore, and for an attractive appearance. Inwardly, and it is to this characteristic of clothing we will now turn, apparel was ‘for cleanliness and neatness of the skin’.27
The basic inward, or under, garments were the shift for women (sometimes known as a smock, and later as a chemise), and for men the shirt and drawers. Shirts and shifts were voluminous garments, long-sleeved and extending in length anywhere from mid-thigh to mid-calf, and were nearly always made of linen. Functionally, as well as being softer on the skin than the, predominantly, woollen outer garments, underclothes served to absorb the body’s sweat and other secretions. While the skin itself was washed rarely, personal linen was changed, or shifted, as often as circumstances allowed. For the poorer sort this might mean they had only one change available– a shirt or smock to wear, and one to launder. The very wealthy would have fresh linen every day. This ‘dry wash’ and the quality and cleanliness of personal linen was fundamental to hygiene and also, by extension, to manners and civility.28 In addition, linen formed part of the routines of dental hygiene – ‘take a
linen cloath and rub your teeth well within and without, to take away the fumosity of the meat and yellownesse of the teeth’29 – and was recommended as a rub for the body to
warm it before exercise or as a daily practice on rising.30 Finally, and it is understandable
with garments so closely associated with the body and worn intimately next to the skin, linens carried an erotic promise, a significance that Daniel Roche has called linen’s ‘carnal value’.31Following exactly the same fashionable logic as hundreds of years later drives the
display of bra straps or the waistbands of underpants, from the latefifteenth century shirts and shifts began to be glimpsed at the margins of the dressed body. At the neck and wrists, or perhaps seen teasingly through the slashes of outer garments, tantalizing scraps of white played with the idea of disclosure. In a society in which the body’s surface was almost always covered, and being entirely without garments was rare, such partial revelation was rich in allusive possibilities, inviting the imagination to consider the reality of the body while keeping it still carefully hidden from view. These points of sensual significance, the halfway position between cloth and skin, sartorially speaking grew in importance, collars and cuffs of expensive garments becoming heavily and elaborately embroidered, with the small ruches of linen growing, eventually, into those decorative and detachable items known as ruffs and bands. The gendered nature of the production of these garments is also worth noting. Unlike heavy outerwear tailored by men, the making of linen garments was almost always the province of the seamstress, either a professional or a needlewoman in her own home.32
Irrespective of social status, in many households wives and sisters therefore made not only their own shifts, but also the shirts of their husbands and brothers (a practice that con- tinued into the nineteenth century). Like the actual sewing, decorative embroidery could also be worked by the amateur or the professional.33 Even elite women might, therefore,
decorate their own and their family’s undergarments with fancy work. The nature of this production could only deepen the significance of underclothing. The busy needle piercing the cloth, the garment resting on the lap: this was fabric touched by familiar hands and imbued with relationships.
As is becoming apparent, the relationship between clothing and the body in early modernity was dense with possibility. Whereas in western culture today bodies have their