Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies current issue

Cultures of Clothing in Later Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Rosenthal, M. F. — 2009-09-23

In the past two decades, the multifaceted discipline of the history of medieval and early modern dress has benefited from reconceptualizations of the long, late Middle Ages and Renaissance as having undergone a revolution of consciousness, belief, and thought with global implications that we still recognize today. A widening of the number and variety of crafts and industries, a proliferation and multiplication of skills and artisanal productivity that crossed regions, the ingenuity of pioneering ideas, and an unprecedented movement of goods, all had far-reaching influences on how merchants, diplomats, humanists, artists, mendicants, pilgrims, itinerant artisans, and laborers viewed their world and moved within it.

Fashion Networks: Consumer Demand and the Clothing Trade in Florence from the Mid-Sixteenth to Early Seventeenth Centuries

Currie, E. — 2009-09-23

This essay explores the practicalities of making and buying clothing in early modern Florence. Drawing on the household accounts of families associated with the Medici court, together with a range of other archival sources, the essay uncovers complex patterns of interaction between consumers, artisans, and retailers. Such networks were fundamental to the way dress fashions developed and achieved wider diffusion during this period. Wealthy Florentines closely supervised the many different stages involved in the acquisition of clothing, often drawing on expertise they had accumulated as silk merchants and as agents purchasing goods on behalf of others. Buying clothing was also a strongly gendered pursuit, shaped by contemporary views of women's domestic roles. Despite the influence exercised by consumers, members of the clothing trade played a significant part in promoting change in fashions. In particular, tailors and mercers became known for their ability to create new designs and offer novel products.

"Worn in Venice and throughout Italy": The Impossible Present in Cesare Vecellio's Costume Books

Jones, A. R. — 2009-09-23

In Cesare Vecellio's costume books, Degli Habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (1590) and Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il Mondo (1598), the basic premise of the costume book—that it recorded styles of dress being worn at the moment of publication in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the New World—was challenged by a range of cultural transformations: changes in the style of clothing, the categories of people who wore particular fashions, the disappearance of fashions over time and through political changes, and the infringement of sumptuary laws. Vecellio acknowledges all these changes, often in a tone of regretful melancholy. This essay analyzes the losses he records as he comments on the 430 to 500 woodcuts that make up his books, which, under pressure from historical shifts, call the epistemological claims of the genre into question.

Old Habits Die Hard: Vestimentary Change in William Durandus's Rationale Divinorum Officiorum

Denny-Brown, A. — 2009-09-23

A medieval and early modern "best seller," William Durandus's monumental late-thirteenth-century liturgical treatise, Rationale Divinorum Officiorum, offered its readers a definitive, codified explanation for almost every aspect of church symbolism. A close look at its book-length discussion of the use and hermeneutics of hurch vestments, however, reveals a consistent problem at the heart of ecclesiastical attire: how the changing "fashion" of actual garments worn by the clergy in this period no longer accorded with the traditional, often biblical prescriptions that guaranteed the authority of those very garments. This article investigates Durandus's delicate (and sometimes not so delicate) handling of these discrepancies with an eye toward the larger theoretical questions involved when material objects, and especially clothes, are used to convey material transcendence.

Moralizing Apparel in Early Modern London: Popular Literature, Sermons, and Sartorial Display

Hentschell, R. — 2009-09-23

This study investigates the cultural and textual relationship between two types of texts that inveigh against the preoccupation with fashionable attire: imaginative secular writing and sermons. While scholars have noted the influence sermons had on secular texts in the period, this article shows how popular literature of the profane, in denouncing excessive pride in apparel, had a profound and lasting influence on homiletic discourse. Sermons are hybrid texts that incorporate both the themes and literary flourish of texts written by secular, polemical authors, such as Philip Stubbes and Thomas Nashe. Special attention is given to the sermons preached at Paul's Cross to show how the complex social space surrounding the pulpit was crucial in enabling preachers to express the critique against excesses in apparel.

Reconciling the Privilege of a Few with the Common Good: Sumptuary Laws in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Muzzarelli, M. G. — 2009-09-23

The ample record of medieval and early modern sumptuary laws represents an extensive historical period and a broad geographical area. Though scholars have not completely ignored these laws, they deserve far more attention and should be explored from many critical approaches. Because of the physical distance separating the documentary evidence, rarely have comparisons been made between sumptuary laws from different geographical areas. This study offers just such a comparison of the laws enacted in Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and England between the thirteenth and the eighteenth centuries, in order to show how these laws operated to reconcile the interests of the privileged few with the common good. Legislators and preachers aimed to redistribute resources by taking advantage of the wealthy's passion for ostentation. The moral rationale for regulating consumption stressed the need for the rich to reserve at least part of their resources for social measures in the form of charity. By regulating luxury through various forms of fines and penalties, sumptuary laws helped to benefit the less privileged and the city in general. Critiques of consumption, of disproportionate individual spending, and, simply put, of luxury, gained significant momentum as a result of sumptuary laws.

Fashions of Friendship in an Early Modern Illustrated Album Amicorum: British Library, MS Egerton 1191

Rosenthal, M. F. — 2009-09-23

The album amicorum, or album of friends, is a singular visual example of early modern travelers' fascination with swiftly changing fashions, regional customs, family lineage, and manuscript decoration. A type of souvenir scrapbook, the album amicorum preserves in its pages colored depictions of local fashions in dress and various regional customs witnessed while traveling. Along with these miniatures, the album combines sententious mottoes, heraldic shields, and personalized inscriptions from friends met during one's travels. The album owner and friends display their newly acquired humanist education by quoting from ancient, medieval, and contemporary authors in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, and Italian, often on the theme of everlasting friendship. This essay looks closely at one album, owned by a German student attending law school at the University of Padua from 1575 to 1579, in order to determine the organizational structure of the album amicorum and how the visual material interacts with the written mottoes and inscriptions.

New Books across the Disciplines

Cornett, M. — 2009-09-23

Call for Submissions

2009-09-23