Clothing Culture, 1350-1650

Catherine Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754638421
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351950923
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Addressing the subject of clothing in relation to such fundamental issues as national identity, social distinction, gender, the body, religion and politics, Clothing Culture, 1350-1650 provides a springboard into one of the most fascinating yet least understood aspects of social and cultural history. Nowhere in medieval and early modern European society was its hierarchical and social divisions more obviously reflected than in the sphere of clothing. Indeed, one of the few constant themes of writers, chroniclers, diarists and commentators from Chaucer to Pepys was the subject of fashion and clothes. Whether it was lauding the magnificence of court, warning against the vanity of fashion, describing the latest modes, or decrying the habit of the lower orders to ape the dress of their social superiors, people throughout history have been fascinated by the symbolism, power and messages that clothes can project. Yet despite this contemporary interest, clothing as a subject of historical enquiry has been a largely neglected field of academic study. Whilst it has been discussed in relation to various disciplines, it has not in many cases found a place as a central topic of analysis in its own right. The essays presented in this volume form part of a growing recent trend to put fashion and clothing back into the centre ground of historical research. From Russia to Rome, Ireland to France, this volume contains a wealth of examples of the numerous ways clothing was shaped by, and helped to shape, medieval and early modern European society. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the study of clothing can illuminate other facets of life and why it deserves to be treated as a central, rather than peripheral, facet of European history.

Chapter One
Introduction

Catherine Richardson

Certainly, such as delight in gorgeous apparel, are commonly puffed up with pride, and filled with divers vanities. So were the daughters of Sion and people of Jerusalem whom Esay the Prophet threateneth, because they walked with stretched-out necks and wandering eyes, mincing as they went, and nicely treading with their feet, that Almighty God would make their heads bald, and discover their secret shame. In that day, saith he, shall the Lord take away the ornament of the slippers, and the caules, and the round attires, and the sweet balls, and the bracelets, and the attires of the head, and the slops, and the head-bands, and the tablets, and the earrings, the rings, and the mufflers, the costly apparel, and the veils, and wimples, and the crisping-pin, and the glasses, and the fine linen, and the hoods, and the lawns.

An Homily Against Excess of Apparel¹

This series of essays investigates the uneasy relationship between the discourses of control and excess, regulation and sensual abandon, in which clothing was figured in the medieval and early modern periods. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, sumptuary legislation repeatedly attempted to define the proper and fitting way in which clothing should demarcate social status, thereby representing dress as a crucial tool in the delineation of social order. Simultaneously, however, moralists decried the sins of pride and vanity which were daily flaunted upon the body by those who, unwisely following the Biblical precedent discussed in the homily, ‘walked with stretched out neckes and wandering eyes, mincing as they went, and nicely treading with their feet’. In social, economic, political and religious terms, the years 1350–1650 were ones of enormous change. Nevertheless, although the precise nature of sumptuary preoccupations altered, there remained an enduring interest in the significance of what people wore which often seems to have bordered on obsession.²

Clothing Culture begins from the premise that a society which could anticipate the sudden and potent intervention of a God who will discover ‘secret shames’ through the removal of a range of ornament as generalised as ‘costly apparel’, and as precise as ‘crisping pins’, took clothing considerably more seriously than its more recent commentators. Lipovetsky opens his consideration of the meaning of fashion within society by stating that, ‘The question of fashion is not a fashionable one among intellectuals’³ and, in 1984, Margaret Spufford recalled that,

... at a recent European conference on the use of probate inventories, it was agreed that of the four basic needs of the human species for procreation, nutrition, shelter and clothing, historical research has concentrated only on procreation and nutrition, while shelter and clothing have gone relatively unexplored. Clothing has received even less attention than shelter.⁴

Historians of the period, however, have not been quick to take up her implicit challenge. In common with domestic life, clothing has developed firm connections with practices, behaviours, and interests pejoratively gendered ‘female’, and therefore not a fitting subject of historical enquiry. In addition, clothing has been and continues to be embroiled in highly moralised debates. As the opening quote suggests, attitudes to medieval and early modern clothing were coloured by its connection to the sins of pride, lust, and other sensual indulgences. Today, a high-profile high fashion market attracts negative comment for the conspicuousness of its consumption, the vacuity of its contribution to culture, its dislocation from the lived experience of the majority, its traffic in sexuality and sexual stereotypes, and its promotion of gendered body images which are, like the garments themselves, at one aspirational remove from reality. It is perhaps partly this context of moralised attacks on the contemporary clothing industry which makes historians wary of considering dress a fitting subject for serious study of the past.

In medieval and early modern society, however, production and consumption were themselves essentially moralised areas, embroiled in ethical notions of ‘honesty’. Wrightson identifies the position of economic activity within the categories of medieval moral philosophy, where it ‘was treated not as a phenomenon to be analysed in its own terms, but rather as a branch of personal and social morality’.⁵ While striving to maintain one’s household was commendable, the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself was still uncomfortably connected to concepts of covetousness and avarice in the early modern period. This contemporary discomfort about the moralisation of financial and aesthetic choices should centralise, rather than marginalize, the scholarly attention paid to the study of a clothing culture imbedded within it.

The overlap between individuals’ economically productive capacities and the earth-bound sins of consumption was also mirrored, in the matter of clothing, in the centrality of the cloth trade to the national balance of payments. Cloth was a vital component of domestic production and international trade for many countries 1350–1650 and beyond. Woollen cloth represented around two-thirds of English exports in 1500, rising to a peak in 1549–50. Despite the demise of the broadcloth industry in the mid sixteenth century, the final quarter of the century saw the development of new markets for the mockadoes and perpetuanas of the New Draperies, for Spanish reds, and fustians.⁶ For some historians, the late fifteenth-century movement of the textile trades to the countryside, and their increasing organisation on the ‘putting out’ or ‘domestic’ systems, were the seeds which would blossom into a capitalist-organised, market-orientated economy. In any case, it was with domestic cloth that the merchants of Elizabeth’s reign traded for the luxury textiles of the rest of the world. While it was the desire for clothing itself which motivated import markets and domestic productions, however, it is the nature of those markets and the control of their commodities which have received the overwhelming majority of scholarly attention: tailors’ raw materials have been investigated in a detail which overwhelms our conception of their finished products.

Writing about Cloth and Clothing

This volume represents a contribution to the formation of medieval and early modern clothed experience as a topic in its own right. Many of its contributors do not work exclusively on dress. Their research interests stretch from international Calvinism to gendered ritual practices, and the academic departments within which they conduct that research are as diverse as Anthropology and Art History. The resulting set of perspectives on the topic gives access to the various historical debates in which clothing is important in pre-modern society, and to the diverse ways in which different kinds of scholars account for and assess such evidence. The contributors share a conception of dress as a material form and a sensitivity to the connections between garments and their wearers. This situates the approach taken here within developments in the study of dress which need to be briefly outlined.

Scholarship of the previous century has made it possible to situate the consumption of clothing in relation to the more traditional historical subject of the production of cloth. Its role in European internal and overseas markets has been fully detailed in a wealth of historical works.⁷ Historians have also traced local involvement in clothmaking processes in an effort to explore the everyday life of clothmakers, and the relationship between their production and consumption in the marketplace.⁸ Individual gilds and companies which dealt in cloth have been investigated in relation to urban trading networks;⁹ and the development of different methods of marketing cloth and clothing, from chapmen to fairs and shopkeepers has been examined.¹⁰

The history of clothing itself has seen a relatively recent explosion of methods and approaches. More ‘traditional’ histories of dress catalogue changes in cut, cloth and the construction of clothing across the period.¹¹ Focusing on the materiality of actual garments, either as preserved or excavated artefacts or as manuscript illuminations, portraits or sculptural representations, this work makes it possible to date items accurately, and hence to relate them to a specific historical context. In addition it often stresses the subtle differences between individual garments in which personal choices are made manifest and, at its best, displays the dynamics of the relationship between garments and bodies.¹²

Clothing histories have also begun to develop in different directions. In 1998, John Styles said, ‘No longer is it possible to sustain a history of dress that considers its principal tasks to be those of establishing the time line of high fashion, or the chronology of changes in the construction of clothing. Questions of meanings and interpretation now dominate the intellectual agenda.’¹³ Such questions have been addressed in new types of histories of dress which are sensitive to the disparities between representation and experience, and which immerse clothing fully in its context of ideological, social and economic change.¹⁴ Historians investigating, for instance, the social reception of religious ideas, gender identity or social status, have also begun to see the value of the evidence of clothing consumption.¹⁵ Literary scholars have become interested in the conceptual and metaphorical significance of clothing and its related practices, an interest which springs partly from their awareness of the significance of theatrical costume in the construction of roles within the theatre.¹⁶ These works have begun to attend to the social and cultural meanings of clothing as a material form which is linked to the development of identity, and whose study must therefore bridge conventional academic disciplines. Exemplary here is Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, which explores the changing relationships between memory, personal identity and social forms through source material which includes ‘literary texts, paintings, textiles, [and] theatrical documents’, tracing the role of dress as a site at which society can ‘think through’ important issues.¹⁷

Theories and methods for the study of modern fashion systems are increasingly well developed along just such interdisciplinary lines. Christopher Breward’s article for an edition of Fashion Theory dedicated to the diverse approaches taken to the history of dress and fashion ties this change of emphasis to the development of the New Art History and Design History.¹⁸ The former, ‘which drew on ideas from Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and structuralism or semiotics, encouraged a fresh prominence for debates incorporating problems of social identity, the body, gender and appearance or representation’, and the latter concentrated on the ‘relationship between production, consumption and the designed artefact’.¹⁹ Breward sees cultural studies’ main contribution to dress studies as its insistence upon the study of objects as systems, which facilitate an examination of ‘the social specificity of representations and their meaning across different cultural practices’. This focus on systems of objects is potentially very significant for a largely pre-literate culture in which material culture was used to articulate a vast range of meanings. In practice, however, this type of analysis has often focused on an integrated fashion system, organised on a global scale within a mass-media culture. It is necessary to temper such an approach with a sensitivity to the particular functions of clothing in pre-modern societies.

Anthropology offers methods and insights which are in many ways appropriate to such societies. Recent work has focused on the category of the material through the social processes by which it is structured.²⁰ It has attempted to rediscover ‘the phenomenological a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Section One: Fabrics of Nation
• Section Two: Marking Distinctions
• Section Three: Material Movements
• Section Four: Discourse, Body, Gender
• Bibliography
• Index