A question I see pop up often, and one that continues to spark much debate in online costuming communities and between historians of dress is: Did early modern women wear anything under their skirts? If so, did they wear drawers?
Susan North’s recently published book, Sweet and Clean?, is one recent scholarly text that has tackled this question. In the book she offers ample evidence for the use of drawers by men during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.[1] When it comes to women, she writes that ‘drawers for women, [is] a question that continues to baffle dress historians’.[2] She offers examples of women wearing drawers in the eighteenth century to argue that it was indeed possible for women to wear such an undergarment. However, she does not provide evidence for the seventeenth century.
Most surviving evidence of drawers being worn by women comes from sixteenth-century Italy, where sources described sex workers as wearing these garments in gender-bending displays of eroticism and the subversion of social norms.
Early modern English ballads depict men and women fighting over what could be drawers or breeches, or, more literally, fighting over who wore the pants in the relationship. The wearing of drawers by women in the context of this type of moralising literature made their husband into a cuckhold, thus undermining his authority and threatening early modern ideas of masculinity.
The Jolly Widdower: / OR, / A Warning for BATCHELORS (Printed for I. Blare, at the Looking glass, on London Bridge, c. 1664-1703). The English Broadside Ballad Archive.
However, moralising literature often tells us more about anxieties early moderns held, rather than the reality of what was actually happening, especially when it comes to dress practices. In this blogpost then I want to set the record straight that, yes, women could and did wear drawers in the seventeenth century.
The earliest example from the seventeenth century is a pair of drawers on the effigy of Queen Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey. Funerary records show that these were specially constructed in 1603, as a warrant relating to funeral expenses noted,
‘And to John Colte for the Image representing her late Majestie with a paire of straight bodies a paire of drawers…’[3]
Janet Arnold examined these drawers and noted they were likely made of fustian and gathered into a waistband that had worked eyelet holes similar to those on breeches. Whether this is a garment that Elizabeth wore (Arnold does not mention if they appear in her accounts) or if they were made to pad out the hips and legs of the effigy (they are stuffed with what appears to be hemp) is unknown.[4]
By the 1630s, Queen Henrietta Maria’s accounts contain multiple references to drawers made from linen and wool.
In May 1631 her French tailor George Gelin billed the wardrobe for:
‘18 pare of Holland drawers for her majesty binded with ribbon for the making of them’.[5]
On 17th August 1639, Henrietta Maria’s other tailor James Bardon
‘delivered into the office of her Majesty’s wardrobe two pair of woolen drawers for the mend & bordering of them’.[6]
Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Henrietta Maria de Bourbon, Queen of England, c. 1636-8. San Diego Museum of Art.
While it is possible that the queen’s drawers were the result of French influence on her wardrobe (she was after all a French princess), there is also evidence that non-royalty wore these undergarments around the same time too.
In 1642, the probate inventory of the widow Elizabeth Burges of St. Nicholas Parish in Bristol recorded
‘one payer of cotten drawers at s. j [1 shilling]’[7]
Here cotton likely referred to a woollen fabric rather than cotton-fibre textiles. Whether these drawers belonged to Elizabeth, or another family member such as her husband is unclear.
In the 1660s Samuel Pepys made ambiguous references to the morality of his wife Elisabeth’s drawers as he was frequently concerned about whether she wore them when visiting her male dance teacher (who Pepys often suspected she was having an affair with).[8]
He recorded in his diary on the 15 May 1663 that
‘But it is a deadly folly and plague that I bring upon myself to be so jealous and by giving myself such an occasion more than my wife desired of giving her another month’s dancing. Which however shall be ended as soon as I can possibly. But I am ashamed to think what a course I did take by lying to see whether my wife did wear drawers to-day as she used to do, — and other things to raise my suspicion of her, but I found no true cause of doing it’.
James Thomson (engraver), after John Hayls, Elisaebth Pepys, c. 1825 (copy of original seventeenth-century portrait, now destroyed).
On 4 June of that same year, Pepys again wrote that
‘I whiled away the morning up and down while they got themselves ready, and I did so watch to see my wife put on drawers, which poor soul she did, and yet I could not get off my suspicions, she having a mind to go into Fenchurch Street before she went out for good and all with me, which I must needs construe to be to meet Pembleton, when she afterwards told me it was to buy a fan that she had not a mind that I should know of, and I believe it is so’.
Rather than wearing drawers indicating a lack of morals or a proclivity to promiscuity (as it did with Italian courtesans) it appears that Pepys was more concerned with whether his wife might allow her dance teacher easy access to her nether regions by not wearing this garment.
In 1688, the linen draper supplied Queen Catherine of Braganza’s wardrobe with
‘fine frieze holland for drawers for her majesty’.[9]
Although a bill does not survive, presumably it was Catherine’s seamstresses who made these linen drawers up, along with other goods from the linen supplied.
Peter Lely, Portrait of Queen Catherine of Braganza, c. 1663-5. Royal Collection.
Both men and women could wear drawers during the seventeenth century, and tailors and seamstresses made these garments for both genders. It appears that, like North has suggested for the eighteenth century, women likely wore them for warmth or riding. Or as Pepys’ diary entries suggest, even modesty. Or perhaps the comment by Pepys about his wife being a ‘pour soul’ for putting on drawers was because it was summer and the weight of all her skirts would already have been hot. Timing of the queens’ bills suggests that woolen drawers were more common in winter and linen in summer, although a much larger sample would need to be taken to determine this.
Much more research is needed the make firm statements about the history of women’s drawers in the early modern period. As Pat Poppy helpfully points out in her comment below, most of these references relate to Francophile women living in England: Henrietta Maria was a French princess and Elisabeth Pepys’ father was French (her mother was not). Catherine of Braganza’s wardrobe, as my forthcoming book will show, was also heavily influenced by French fashions. So was this a French thing?
I will continue to update this post as I come across references. But what is certain is that drawers were certainly owned and worn by some women in seventeenth century England. How widespread the practice was remains to be determined.
References
[1] Susan North, Sweet and Clean?: Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 126-30.
[3] The National Archives UK (TNA), E 351/3145, fol. 25, transcribed and cited in Janet Arnold, ‘The “pair of straight bodies” and “a pair of drawers” dating from 1603 which Clothe the Effigy of Queen Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey’, Costume, 41 (2007), 9.
[7] Transcribed in Edwin George, Stella George and Peter Fleming, eds., Bristol Probate Inventories, Part 1: 1542-1650 (Bristol Record Society, 2002), 125.
I’m excited to finally share that I’ve signed a contract with Bloomsbury Visual Arts (an imprint of Bloomsbury Academic) for my next book,
The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens: Gender and Work in the Royal Wardrobe and the Fashion Marketplace
The book examines the lives and changing work of the women who made, sold, managed and cared for the clothing of five Stuart queens between 1603–1714: Anna of Denmark, Henrietta Maria, Catherine of Braganza, Queen Mary II and Queen Anne.
Using a wide range of written, visual and material sources, including extensive royal household accounts, this book explores the clothing and fashion cultures of the Stuart period through the lens of the work performed by women (and men!) who worked in the shops of London and the private chambers of the royal household, sitting at the intersection of the fashion marketplace and the royal courts.
In doing so, it recovers the material knowledge and skills of women who clothed these queens. This includes makers and sellers such as seamstresses, silkwomen, tirewomen, mantua-makers and milliners, as well as elite women such as the mistress of the robes and mistress of the sweet coffers, and servants such as laundresses and wardrobe attendants, who worked to manage and care for clothing in Office of the Robes, a sub-department of the Queens’ household.
The book demonstrates that women of all sorts were closely involved in the creation of Stuart magnificence in the fashion marketplace and royal courts of seventeenth-century England and their work was often facilitated by private informal female networks that spanned elite and non-elite structures. This ‘upstairs-downstairs’ history also focuses on under represented periods of fashion history, particularly the period 1680-1715.
I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into writing the rest of the book and looking forward to taking you all on this journey and talking more about my research in both blog and Instagram posts.
Quilted petticoats in England and America are usually attributed to and discussed in the context of the eighteenth century. This is likely due to the fact that all the earliest surviving quilted petticoats (to my knowledge) date from this period.
Quilted Petticoat, c. 1740-60 (made), 1870-1910 (altered), British. Victoria and Albert Museum, T.430-1967.
I am currently writing a book about the women who made, sold, managed and cared for the clothing of England’s Stuart queens during the period 1603-1714. As I have been transcribing their wardrobe accounts I have come across several references to quilted petticoats.
But firstly, what is a petticoat? The term ‘petticoat’ began to appear in English in the sixteenth century when it was used interchangeably with the preexisting term ‘kirtle’. At this time, and until the mid-seventeenth century, petticoat usually referred to a skirt that had an attached, sleeveless bodice (known as “petticoat bodies”). A petticoat with an attached front lacing bodice is visible in the painting below.
The woman who is standing on the right in this scene is lacing up her petticoat (skirt and attached bodice), which she wears underneath what appears to be a waistcoat (jacket) and jerkin. Frans Francken the Younger, The Witches’ Kitchen, 1606, Hermitage Museum.
By the second half of the seventeenth century, “petticoat” generally began to refer only to the skirt. Petticoats could be under or outer wear. Women often wore many layers of petticoats at this time made from various different materials. This brings me to quilted petticoats in the seventeenth century.
Evidence from the Queens’ Accounts
Did quilted petticoats exist in the seventeenth century?
Yes! They did.
Quilted petticoats begin to appear in the royal accounts after the reign of Henrietta Maria. Unfortunately, the first twenty years of accounts belonging to Catherine of Braganza have not survived. However, those during the 1680s do.
In the Christmas quarter of 1685-6, several “Quilted coats[s]” were made or altered for dowager Queen Catherine of Braganza. At thsi time, the queen’s tailor and dressmakers also provided “new Eaching & Ribanding” for “a Quilted coat” and widened the “Wasts of 3 Quilted Coats.”[1]
During the early 1700s, Queen Anne was provided with several types of quilted petticoats.[2] These included garments described as “white Quilted under peticoats.” The fabrics that these quilted under petticoats were made from are not mentioned, but if can be assumed that they were some sort of linen, as silks were usually specified in these accounts.
In later periods, quilted petticoats were primarily worn for warmth and this was no different in the late seventeenth century. Even when quilting wasn’t mentioned, wadding of silk, “ferret” and of an unspecified nature (likely wool or cotton) were also frequently listed in Queen Anne’s accounts. For example:
It is likely that the quilted petticoats belonging to Catherine of Braganza and Queen Anne resembled the quilted petticoat belonging to a doll known as Lady Clapham (fig ). The doll portrays fashionable clothing worn by wealthy women during the 1690s and is believed to have belonged to the Cockerell family who had a family home in Clapham, London. This petticoat shows the same sorts of decorative needlework that we see on later eighteenth century examples.
But quilted petticoats were not just common among queens and other elites in England.
In 1688, Thomas Barlow and Oliver Morris of St. Giles’s in the Fields were Indicted for entring the Dwelling-house of John Appleby” and stealing “one Silk Flowred Gown, value 40 s. one Quilted Petticoat, value 10 s. one Crape Petticoat, value 8 s. a pair of Sattin Stayes, value 10 s. and other goods of Ann Thomas.”[3] All these items appear to have been part of an ensemble, the gown was likely a new fashionable mantua gown.
Later, in 1692, Elizabeth Morgan (alias Jones) and Sarah Chandlor were tried for stealing a quilted petticoat from Faith Butler in London too.[4] By 1697, quilted petticoats were also referenced in The provok’d wife a comedy by John Vanbrugh.
These garments therefore appear to have been a relatively common sight by the end of the seventeenth century in places such as London.
The first half of the sixteenth century was a period dominated by repeated conflicts in Europe. The immense amounts of practical and ceremonial arms and armour that these conflicts required fuelled this so-called golden age of armour production seen in key centres of production such as Milan, Augsburg, and Tyrol. During these times of occupation, particularly during the Italian Wars, armourers like the Negroli family of Milan were commissioned to make many garments for princes such as Charles V, and so these items represent elite ideals of power and glory. Although some scholars have claimed that ‘much of the decoration on arms and armour is simply ornamental’, power dynamics and paradoxes between the genders during the Renaissance were exploited in the decorative processes of etching and embossing to personify key ideas such as bravery, perils, fortune, virtue, and victory, in either male or female forms.[i] These representations were deliberately fashioned to make explicit proclamations about power by noblemen on the battlefield and beyond in sixteenth-century Europe. Two concepts that armour during this century embodied in these wats were those of fortune and virtue.
Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert and Cornelis Bos after Maarten van Heemskerck, The Capture of Francis I by the forces of Charles V during the Battle of Pavia in 1525, c. 1555-56. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, RP-P-BI-6603.
During the medieval period Fortuna was potrayed an assistant to God and she stood for the decrepitude of worldly things and expressed a hidden, unknowable order that made men and women powerless to chance without faith. However, by the fifteenth century humanists and political theorists who believed that men could take back control began to conceptualise Fortuna as possessing innate feminine weaknesses. Like women, Fortuna was now a fundamentally unknowable, destructive and unpredictable power, but one that could also be influenced or yield to those who fought with force.[ii] To counteract the unpredictability of Fortuna and take back control over destiny, authors began to articulate the concept of virtù, something that was masculine, rational and ultimately victorious.[iii] Although early humanists stressed that virtus (a morally good force) was an intrinsic value for all rulers as it brought glory and greatness, for Niccolò Machiavelli the concept of virtù was not necessarily concerned with ethics.[iv] Rather it was more dynamic and stood for political and military achievements that were the foundation of flourishing states.[v]
Lady Fortuna and the Wheel of Fortune. From an edition of Boccaccio’s “De Casibus Virorum Illustrium” (Paris, 1467) MSS Hunter 371-372 (V.1.8-9). Image (vol. 1: folio 1r). Credit: Wiki
Machiavelli penned his widely circulated work of political philosophy The Prince (1532) in reaction to what he perceived to be the weaknesses of rulers during the Italian Wars. He concluded the work by stating that due to the ‘enormous upheavals that have been observed and are being observed everyday’ it was imperative that men fought to control the whims of Fortuna with ‘ordinata virtù’ (well-ordered virtue) because ‘fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under it is necessary to beat her and force her down’.[vi] Machiavelli here echoed the fifteenth-century humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pius II) who after Alfonso V of Aragon’s victory in Naples in the early 1440s imagined the king entering the city and grabbing ‘Fortuna by the scruff of the neck’.[vii] Fortuna’s antithesis Virtù was therefore intrinsically linked to forceful state building and warfare.
Santi di Tito, Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli, c. second half of sixteenth century. Palazzo Vecchio. Credit: Wiki
These concepts and their gendered power dynamics were increasingly emphasized in political theory, literature, and art during the turmoil of the Italian Wars. The importance of personifying Fortuna as feminine so that she may be overcome by masculine virtù is best exemplified in a portrait medal of French king Francis I from 1537. One side of the portrait medal depicts the king in profile wearing a laurel wreath and holding a staff with a fleur de lis, proclaiming him ‘Francis King of the French’. The reverse side of the medallion shows the king in armour on horseback, arm raised with sword in hand, trampling the naked female figure of Fortuna. The inscription reads ‘He has vanquished fortune through virtue’.[viii] The portrayal of Francis on horseback defeating fortune through virtue is a statement of the King’s tact as a military leader.
Medallion of Francis I – Bust & Allegory, c. 1537, cast iron, Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 7272b.
As Machiavelli wrote in The Prince, which had been published only five years earlier, it was a prince who had come to power via virtue (here meaning skill and temperament), rather than fortune, who could maintain his principality, as ‘he who relies less upon Fortune has maintained his position best’.[ix] This gendered juxtaposition was therefore a very clear claim about Francis’s masculinity – he was a courageous and brave prince, who won battles for his Kingdom through his reliance on his masculine traits of virtue such as military skill, rather than relying on the feminine whims of fortune.
Similarly, when the concept of fortune was depicted on armour it was always personified as female to remind the wearer of the potential dangers of relying too much on this feminine force. Take for example a shield in the Royal Armoury in Madrid made in 1543 in Augsburg for Prince Phillip (later Phillip II of Spain) by the armorer Mattheus Frauenpreiss.[x] This round shield portrays the semi-nude figure of a woman (Fortuna) holding an oar while attempting to row the vessel. Around her are the words ‘FIDES’ (faith) on a shield, ‘CARO’ (humanity) on the boat, ‘FORTEGA’ (fortitude) on the oar, and ‘GRACIA DEI’ (by the Grace of God) on a box below her knee. There are two possible interpretations of this shield. La Rocca has argued that fortune is depicted as trying to reverse the direction of humanity with the aid of a steering oar and guided by the shield and compass.[xi] This representation of Fortuna appears to take its cues from the medieval understandings as an assistant to God – with faith fortune can be a guiding force.
However, as with all visual culture, the meaning of this scene is multivalent and it could also warn of the risks of letting Fortuna have too much control over the ship of humanity, as she is facing towards the stern and so does not have control over its movement. The top of the mast also contains a small fool’s cap making this vessel a ‘metaphorical ship of fools’ that is being steered by the unpredictable force that is Fortuna.[xii] The fools here are perhaps those who place their trust in fortune to lead them, rather than those other items on the vessel like the shield of faith. In either case, as La Rocca has proposed, the ‘overall meaning of the shield’s symbolism seems to be intended as a commentary on the misdirection of human folly’.[xiii] The feminine force of Fortuna was considered to play a key role in guiding human fate and potential folly during conflict. It is possible that this shield was gifted to the young Prince Phillip on his wedding day as a salient reminder to the importance of his union to Maria Manuela of Portugal and his role as prince during these troubled times.[xiv]
This acknowledgement of the place of Fortuna in deciding human destiny accounts for other examples of armour and arms that contain her image. A ceremonial breastplate of worked gilded iron gifted to the future Philip III of Spain by Carlo Emmanuelle, Duke of Savoy, now in the Royal Armoury in Madrid, contains the image of Fortuna is framed by winged genii, Justice, Temperance, and other figures, as well as the word ‘SPANIA’.[xv] The piece was made in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century by an unknown armourer.
Hans Sebald Beham, Fortuna, c. 1641, engraving. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-OB-10.856
Arms from this period also depict Fortuna. A print with a design for a dagger sheath by Hans Holbein the Younger and Hans Lützelburger dating from 1520-1526 shows a woman (Fortuna) in armour standing on a shell with drapery flowing around her.[xvi] In both these examples the symbolic meaning could be two-fold. Authors like Machiavelli stressed that human actions could only be controlled to an extent by virtù, with the rest remaining the domain of Fortuna.[xvii] Therefore, by personifying fortune as Fortuna on armour and arms this practice served to not only remind the wearer of her dangerous influence and acknowledge the part she played in his fate, but in turn, it would also have had the effect of prompting him to remember her antithesis stressed by humanist authors – his own masculine virtù that could overcome her feminine threat.
Filippo Negroli, Helmet all’Antica, c. 1532–35. This piece was possibly a copy of the original in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 04.3.202.
In contrast to Fortuna, virtù was rendered in anthropomorphic forms that transformed the wearer into the vision of masculinity that this concept represented. This is most recognisable in all’antica-style helmets produced by the Milanese armourer Filippo Negroli for Francesco Maria della Rovere the Duke of Urbino, Charles V, and the Gonzagas of Mantua.[xviii] These helmets are sophisticated examples of how embossed armours could literally fashion their wearer into their desired human form. The earliest helmet of this style was forged in 1532 for the Duke of Urbino. It is a burgonet of blackened steel embossed in high relief that forms a head with curly hair and ear lobes, wearing a diadem of twisted palms.[xix] The purpose of this burgonet was to create the likeness of a Roman youth on the wearer, covering his own physical traits and replacing them with those of youth rendered in steel. However, the helmet soon caught the eye of a much more important and powerful patron, Charles V.
A letter sent from the Duke of Mantua to the Duke of Urbino described the Emperor’s interest in Francesco’s recent commission and urged him to send it to the Emperor for inspection. Charles V was so impressed with Urbino’s anthropomorphic helmet that he commissioned his own. It was presented to him on his official visit to Milan in 1533.[xx] The Emperor’s helmet, however, was quite different in form and meaning than that of Urbino’s. It was a full helmet made in two parts of steel and gold. The burgonet was embossed and chiselled by Negroli to create the head of a classical warrior with gold curly hair and earlobes, wearing a laurel wreath. The detachable buffe (lower face defence) contains an additional full beard, lips, and mouth. It is possible that there was also another missing piece of the helmet that created a mask and concealed the face.[xxi]
Filippo Negroli, Classical Roman Burgonet of Charles V, Milanese, c. 1533. Madrid: Royal Armoury, 10000075 – 10000076, D-1; D-2
While both anthropomorphic helmets created classical masculine heads, the differences in the ways that these helmets were gendered male had great implications for expressions of virtù by these Renaissance rulers. While the Duke of Urbino’s helmet and armour depicts a Roman youth at the cusp of manhood and is without personal insignia, the Emperor’s helmet represented a grown Roman man with a full beard. It contains many details that link it explicitly to Charles V such as a collar of the gold fleece with Burgundian fire steels and flaming flints and Charles’s device of PLVS VLTRA with the columns of Hercules.[xxii]
Anthropomorphic helmets and Cuirasses (joined breastplates and backplates) were also embossed to create well-muscled torsos that alluded to men of the ancient world allowed their wearers to literally embody the qualities of virtus and virtù during the conflicts of the sixteenth century.[xxiii] As Carolyn Springer has noted in her discussion of classically-inspired armour, these cuirasses constructed an idealised vision of the ‘elite male body through the process of prosthetic addition’ and they were a form of exclusively male masquerade that enabled the wearer to disguise his own imperfections to achieve the ‘highest model of proportion and physical beauty’ and to represent himself ‘in a heroic and aggrandized mode’.[xxiv] These helmets and torso pieces concealed the wearer’s true form behind a metal façade, allowing him to literally become a classical Roman Emperor who epitomised these values. As Francesco Petrarca advised Niccolò Acciaiuoli in a letter written in the late fifteenth century, to fight back against Fortuna he must become a conqueror and have the ‘moral qualities of a Caesar’, or in other words ‘a man of true manliness’ like those Caesars of the past would overcome Fortuna and attain public glory.[xxv]
Although Charles V commissioned this piece, there is no evidence to indicate that the Emperor dictated its mature appearance.[xxvi] Rather it appears that this was a shrewd political move on behalf of Negroli and Urbino to portray Charles V as he imagined himself to be. Portrait medals struck between 1520 and 1540 celebrated the Holy Roman Emperor as a modern Caesar as they depict him with a laurel wreath on his head and clad in Roman-style armour surrounded by the text ‘IMP. CAES CAROLVS V AVG’, in direct imitation of roman coins.[xxvii] Therefore, the form that this helmet took, whether dictated by Charles himself or others, allowed the Emperor to take that final step in literally embodying his title of a virtuous Caesar.
Joos Gietleughen, Hubert Goltzius, Gillis Coppens van Diest, Portrait of Charles V as Caesar, c. 1559. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, BI-2008-4132-148.
This blog post was adapted from an early version of my new research article ‘Female Personifications and Masculine Forms: Gender, Armour and Allegory in the Habsburg-Valois Conflicts of sixteenth-Century Europe’ in which I explore the use of female personifications on sixteenth-century armour made for men between 1525 and 1550. It argues that foreign invading forces and their allies exploited or inverted traditional gender binaries associated with the classical and humanist iconography of the Italian Renaissance, particularly its female allegorical forms, to visually signify power relationships between combatants during the Italian Wars. Rather than simply embodying masculinity, elaborate ceremonial armours with images of women are revealing of both ideals of masculinity and femininity during times of war. These portrayals were part of wider conversations about gender and power, about the strength and weaknesses of women, and, ultimately, women’s inferior status to men, which were utilised in allegorical forms to make claims to authority on these elite forms of male dress.
This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (DP180102412) held at The University of Western Australia
References
[i] Donald J. LaRocca, Gods of war: Sacred imagery and the decoration of arms and armor (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013), 3.
[ii] Arndt Brendecke and Peter Vogt, ‘The Late Fortuna and the Rise of Modernity’ in The End of Fortuna and the Rise of Modernity, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2017), 2; Corretti, Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, 68.
[iii] Brendecke and Vogt, ‘The Late Fortuna and the Rise of Modernity,’ 1-5.
[iv] Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 123.
[v] Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New York: Praeger, 1965), 31; Skinner, Visions of Politics, 144, 154-6.
[vi] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. and ed. Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 84-87.
[vii] Brendecke and Vogt, ‘The Late Fortuna and the Rise of Modernity,’ 4.
[viii]Medallion of Francis I – Bust & Allegory, c. 1537, cast iron, Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum, 7272b.
[x] Donald J. LaRocca, ‘Monsters, Heroes, and Fools: A Survey of Embossed Armor in Germany and Austria, ca. 1475 – ca. 1575,’ A farewell to arms, studies on the history of arms and armour, eds. Gert Groenendijk, Piet de Gryse, Dirk Staat, Heleen Bronder (Legermuseum, 2004), 42.
[xi] LaRocca, ‘Monsters, Heroes, and Fools,’ 42; Carolyn Springer, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 128.
[xv] Albert F. Calvert, Spanish Arms and Amour: Being a Historical and Descriptive Account of the Royal Armoury of Madrid (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1907), 131.
[xvi] Hans Holbein the Younger (artist) and Hans Lützelburger (block cutter), Design for a Dagger Sheath, c. 1520-6, print, London: The British Museum, 1895,0122.841-842.
[xvii] Brendecke and Vogt, ‘The Late Fortuna and the Rise of Modernity,’ 5.
[xviii] Silvio Leydi, ‘A History of the Negroli Family,’ in Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance: Filippo Negroli and his Contemporaries, eds. Stuart W. Pyhrr and José-A. Godoy (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 41; Stuart W. Pyhrr and José-A. Godoy, eds. Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance: Filippo Negroli and his Contemporaries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 119.
[xix] Pyhrr and Godoy, Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance, 116.
[xx] Springer, Armour and Masculinity, 105; Leydi, ‘A History of the Negroli Family,’ 41.
[xxi] Álvaro Soler del Campo, The art of power: Royal armor and portraits from Imperial Spain (Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior, 2009), 48.
[xxii] Pyhrr and Godoy, Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance, 125-130.
[xxiii] Pyhrr and Godoy, Heroic Armor of the Italian Renaissance, 14-15.
[xxiv] Springer, Armour and Masculinity, 11, 25, 30.
[xxv] Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143; Skinner, Visions of Politics, 123, 125.
Kleermaker (The Tailor), Gillis van Scheyndel (I), 1638. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, RP-P-1981-140
In 2018 I spent two months in the UK going through records relating to tailors, body-makers, and farthingale-makers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the Drapers’ and Clothworker’ Companies in London. While doing my archival research at the Drapers’ Company hall, I mentioned to the archivist Penny that the unusual name of a prolific body-maker, Theophilus Riley, kept popping up in many of my sources. Considering that many of the other makers of bodies (boned-torso garments – the precursors of stays and corsets) were named John, Robert, Henry, Samuel, etc., the name Theophilus was bound to stick out to me.
Penny acknowledged the strange name, noting that she felt like she had read it before but could not recall where. This was until one day she came into the small study room where I was sitting, surrounded by numerous 300-year old hand-bound volumes of company records, and told me that she had remembered where she had heard the name before. A draper called Theophilus Riley had bequeathed a large sum of money and property to the Company in the seventeenth century and, astonishingly, this endowment was still aiding many of the Company’s charitable activities today.
Although Riley was acknowledged as a draper (a dealer in cloth, usually woollen) in the Company’s financial records, and technically he could call himself a draper as he was a member of the Drapers’ Company (by the seventeenth century many members of London’s livery companies did not practice the same profession as their namesake), his actual profession was body-making and a body-selling. Essentially, he was one of the first corset-makers in London.
This made me more determined to find out more about this interesting man’s life. Luckily for me, such an unusual name meant that I was able to track down many records relating to the life of Theophilus Riley – and let’s just say that he was one very interesting fellow!
The Life and Times of Theophilus Riley
Theophilus Riley was apprenticed under John Smith between 1608 and 1616. Like many members of these livery companies, his origins are obscure as information about his father is missing from apprenticeship records. Upon completion of his apprenticeship Riley quickly set up his own shop in Bow Lane and took on his first apprentice in 1617. Given his political leanings in later life, which I will talk about below, it is possible that he came from a wealthy merchant family in London and this would explain his ability to set up a profitable workshop so soon after finishing his apprenticeship.
Circled is the location of one of Riley’s properties in Cheapside.
The 1630s and early 1640s were prosperous for Riley. During the 1630s he took out two leases on properties near Cheapside – London’s shopping street – which were owned by the Drapers’ Company. From 1642-1655 he was a Liveryman in the Drapers Company, a position that also gave him power within the city of London as Liverymen played a key part in electing the city’s sheriffs, mayors, and members of parliament.
Riley’s successful career took place during one of the most troubled times in England’s history. In January of 1642, King Charles I had tried to arrest five leading members of parliament. He feared that they were determined to seize political control and to impeach his French-Catholic wife, Queen Henrietta Maria. When this failed, Charles left London and headed north where he had a strong support base. By August, the king had raised the royal standard at Nottingham, signaling that he considered himself to be at war. In October of 1642, he led his army into battle at Edgehill, the first battle of the wars.
The king’s departure from London in 1642 left the city under the control of his enemies in parliament. At the start of the civil wars Charles’s forces controlled roughly the Midlands, Wales, the West Country and northern England and he established a new court at Oxford. Parliament controlled London, the south-east and East Anglia, as well as the English navy. London was therefore a parliament stronghold and many citizens of the city joined the parliamentarian cause, including Theophilus Riley.
Records reveal that between 1642-3, Riley was a parliamentarian in the Common Council. That same year he was appointed as an ‘assessor for parliamentary subscription and assessments’ and he sat on several important committees such as those that regulated the London Militia and examined ‘malignant, scandalous and seditious ministers.’ By 1643 Riley had become the ‘scoutmaster of the Citie of London’, the chief of the intelligence department of the Parliamentary Army. This meteoric political rise during the tumultuous period of the English Civil Wars as a man who was proclaimed to be ‘of a known & approved Integritie’ and in ‘great esteem with the then Parlament and Citie of London’ soon came to an end though.
From December 1643 to January 1644 Riley was implicated as a royalist spy in Brooke’s Plot. This was a plot that aimed to divide the City of London by severing the ties between parliament and the influential merchants who funded their war effort, and to broker a peace treaty between the City and the king. This was done with the aim of preventing the Scottish army from taking part in the civil war and to bring about an end to the conflict.[1] Riley’s role as scoutmaster had brought him in contact with royalists Sir Basil Brook and Colonel Read, as well as Thomas Violet, a goldsmith who had been jailed for refusing to pay taxes that funded the parliamentarian war effort. For his part, it appears that Riley had become weary of the war and resented the religious and economic demands of the Scots. Riley, whose code name during the plot was ‘The Man in the Moone’, perhaps taken from a popular tavern called The Half Moon that was close to his shop in Cheapside, oversaw securing releases for the prisoners so that they could travel to the royal court in Oxford. Eventually the plot was discovered, and the conspirators found themselves in the Tower.[2] Riley was released within the year and his estates were not ‘sequestred or taken away’, unlike those of his fellow plotters.
After this scandal it seems that Riley retired as a parliamentarian but remained active in the Drapers’ Company. He is recorded as being of the Livery and Assistants between 1642-64, and he took his last body-making apprentice in 1646. When he died in 1656/7 part of his other property in Bow Lane was left to his wife Elizabeth and their daughter Mary Swift and her children, and the other part to the Masters, Wardens, and Assistants of the Drapers’ Company to hold in trust for his grandchildren until 1686. As well as these properties near Cheapside and Bow Lane, his will also reveals that Riley leased or owned a number of other properties both within and outside the confines of the City walls. The will also left a £600 endowment that stipulated the creation of a trust for apprenticing children of the poor of the Drapers’ Company, which is still active today.
References
[1] J. Rushworth, Mr Rushworth’s Historical Collections from January 1642 to April 1646: abridg’d and improved, Volume 5 (London: 1708), p. 160-2.
[2] A. Percy, A Cunning plot to divide and destroy, the Parliament and the city of London… (London: 1643), pp. 1-12; John Rushworth, Mr Rushworth’s Historical Collections from January 1642 to April 1646, Volume 5 (London: 1708); p. 162; A. Tubb, Thomas Violet, a Sly and Dangerous Fellow: Silver and Spying in Civil War London (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), pp. 44-46.
Very excited to announce that my book Shaping Femininity has a cover image and pre-order links! See below for details!
About Shaping Femininity
In sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This very structured form, created using garments called bodies and farthingales, existed in various extremes in Western Europe and beyond, in the form of stays, corsets, hoop petticoats and crinolines, right up until the twentieth century. With a nuanced approach that incorporates a stunning array of visual and written sources and drawing on transdisciplinary methodologies, Shaping Femininity explores the relationship between material culture and femininity by examining the lives of a wide range of women, from queens to courtiers, farmer’s wives and servants, uncovering their lost voices and experiences. It reorients discussions about female foundation garments in English and wider European history, arguing that these objects of material culture began to shape and define changing notions of the feminine bodily ideal, social status, sexuality and modesty in the early modern period, influencing enduring Western notions of femininity.
Beautifully illustrated in full colour throughout, Shaping Femininity is the first large-scale exploration of the materiality, production, consumption and meanings of women’s foundation garments in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England. It offers a fascinating insight into dress and fashion in the early modern period, and offers much of value to all those interested in the history of early modern women and gender, material culture and consumption, and the history of the body, as well as curators and reconstructors.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes to the Reader
Abbreviations
Introduction: Investigating the structured female body
1. The foundations of the body: foundation garments and the early modern female silhouette
2. The artificial body: courtiers, gentlewomen and disputed visions of femininity, 1560-1650
3. The socially mobile body: consumption of foundation garments by middling and common women, 1560 – 1650
4. The body makers: making and buying foundation garments in early modern England
5. The everyday body: assumptions, tropes and the lived experience
6. The sexual body: eroticism, reproduction and control
7. The respectable body: rising consumption and the changing sensibilities of late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century England
Conclusion: legacies and misconceptions
Glossary
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
Hot on the heels on my talk on whalebone and early modern fashion, I recently gave another presentation about the work I’ve been doing on farthingale-makers and body-makers in late sixteenth and seventeenth-century London. This paper was given at a University of Melbourne lunchtime seminar and and I’ve made it available for everyone to view below:
In 2018 I had the pleasure of being a David Walker Memorial visiting fellow at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. The Bodleian Library contains one of the largest collections of guild records (MS Morrell series) relating to tailoring outside of London. My research aims were to learn more about these trades and their craft in England during the seventeenth century and to see if I could find any evidence of body-making or farthingale-making in this guild or indeed the city.
Although I found no evidence of these separate branches of tailoring in Oxford, the MS Morrell records reveal fascinating and important insights into the everyday life of tailors and the role that these artisans and their guild played in the social and economic community of Oxford at the time. In 1621 it was estimated by the Oxford guild that the trade directly supported a population (tailors and their families) of five hundred people in the city and surrounds. Various donations to poor members or the guild for things such as clothing and burial expenses during sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonstrate the importance of the guild to this community.
The records that yielded the most interesting information were the guilds ordinances, meeting books and wardens books, as they contain both company orders and fines given out when those rules were disobeyed give detailed information about the daily lives of tailors. These records reveal the quality control measures that took place within the trade (and fines received for poor quality work), how tailors were and were not allowed to approach customers, where and when tailors could ply their trade, descriptions of certain aspects of shops and working chambers, and the complex relationships between Masters, Journeymen and Apprentices.
MS Morrell 6, Bodleian Libraries Oxford
Select examples from the records include a fine issued to Thomas Day in 1600 for “begging worke of other mens customers” and in 1604 a Richard Palmer was fine “for suffering Robert Baylie to worke in his house & to carry home worke to his owne house & to his owne vse, forfeyted & paid.” Tailors in the city were clearly expected to attract their own customers without begging and not to undertake work in living chambers, but rather in commercial spaces like shop fronts.
Other fines were issued for the behaviour of tailors and their apprentices, indicating that the company sought to uphold the behaviour and hierarchies of respect within the profession. In 1622 John Ffayrebeard was fined “for calling MS [master] Steevens late MS of the company Jack a Napes and foole” – jack a napes here meaning a monkey. The most common fine in the guild’s books are aimed at tailors who were “workinge disorderlie” – what this actually meant though is hard to gauge as very little detail is offered beyond this description, so it likely covered a wide range of offences.
The records also reveal measures taken by the guild and its members to maintain the monopoly on the types of garments that were made by tailors. For example, records reveal that during the 1660s to 1680s the guild had ongoing disputes with both the Glovers and the Milliners who were accused of selling garments that were usually made by tailors, such as leather breeches, or ready-made clothing in Oxford, which threatened the tailoring trade. Many tailors were also punished for selling ready-made clothing, which undermined the relationship between tailors and their customers, and the bespoke nature of the tailor’s work. This is all crucial information that allows us to build a picture of the tailoring trade, whose skills and knowledge were taught orally and tacitly from Master to apprentice.
Jan Luyken, Kleermaker [Tailor], 1694, print. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, RP-P-OB-44.458.Additionally, these records offer insights into the roles that women played in tailoring and the guild. Female apprentices do not appear in the tailors guild records, except in a few instances where their Masters received fines for employing a woman which was against “ye bylaws of th[e] Company…” Widows do appear in election records, meeting notes and quarterages paid, however, this was not until the 1610s. This indicates that it was only at the start of the seventeenth century that widows, who were continuing their husband’s business after his death, were recognised as legitimate members of the guild and could hold similar powers within the guild as their male counterparts, such as voting in elections. Various records relating to meeting and fines also reveal that widows could have apprentices, hire journeymen and were fined for disobeying orders, just as other members of the guild were.
For example, in 1626 John Wildcroose was fined for trading in his own house under the “pretext of Widdow Bolton whose name and freedom was merely vsed by his craft to bolsten out his fraud”, while later in 1666 the widow Jane Slatter was fined for “setting a journeyman to work without him being sworn.” It was expected that widows should employ their own journeymen or apprentices, as another fine issued in 1626 to Robbe Mooney for “makeinge a contracte wth widdow Norland that for paieinge… he should have the use of her shoppe.” One particular widow, Ann Dudly, was repeatedly fined between the years 1660-70 for refusing to attend meetings when summoned and for “sending to the Master a very sleight answer”, indicating that widows held a similar position in the company as their male peers.
All this information about tailoring in Oxford gives insights into the production of clothing in sixteenth and seventeenth-century England and the gendered distribution of labour within such trades. I’ll be using some of the research I did in Oxford, alongside the archival work I undertook at the Drapers’ and Clothworkers’ Companies in London, in my forthcoming monograph in a chapter on making and selling foundation garments in early modern England.
Most people do not realise (until they must go through the process) that sourcing rights and permissions for images to use in publications can be a tedious and very expensive process.
I am currently sourcing images for my book and other projects, and I recently had an email from my colleague asking where to get free or discounted images for use in publications. I decided to compile a list of the institutions and agencies who I have used to get images and my thoughts on them.
Before you read my list you must check out Hilary Davidson’s (aka FourRedShoes) blog – Free Academic Images– to search by continent for any institution that I may have missed and their terms and conditions.
I also need to point out that you must check with some of these institutions whether they consider your publisher to be non-commercial or commercial. Some will allow free image use for works published by a University Press or non-for-profit, while other well-respected academic publishers are considered “commercial” and may incur a fee.
Note that as I’m an early modernist, this list mainly pertains to that field and to artworks that are very much out of copyright.
Also: ALWAYS ASK FOR A DISCOUNT.Whether it be because you are placing a bulk order, you are a student, ECR or independent researcher, always ask! Be shameless – you’ll be surprised by how many places will give you a discount or even give you the image for free!
FREE ACADEMIC IMAGES*
* under certain conditions, check terms of use:
Rijksmuseum– the very best in my opinion. Easy to use. You can download from the image/object entry page or contact their helpful image service to get 300 dpi files via transfer, can publish in anything for any reason. They have a lot of English print material.
Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) – also great and easy to download off the website. Can publish in anything for any reason. NOTE: Not all images are 300 dpi, so you may need to convert them in photoshop.
Wellcome collection – Easy to use, download off the image/object entry page.
Getty Museum – Easy to use, download off the image/object entry page.
The Royal Collection Trust UK– free for most academic publications, permission needs to be granted via contacting their permissions team.
The Folger Shakespeare Library – free for online blogs and websites with a share-a-like licence. For publications with UPs and most academic journals fees are waived, “commercial” publishers incur a fee. Obtaining publication-quality versions of the images incurs a small processing fee.
Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A)– free for publications with UPs and most academic journals, check first. Need to pay more to obtain digital rights of more than 4 years.
Kunstmuseum Basel – Easy to use, download off the image/object entry page.
The Clark– Easy to use, download off the image/object entry page.
National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG) – free for most scholarly article publications under a certain run, not free for monographs. Service is easy to use, create an account and add the image to your trolley.
Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge – staff are very helpful, they waived the fee for me because I was a postgrad student.
New York Public Library – Many of the images in their collection are out of copyright and Open access. Under the image look for the green box with download options and “Free to use without restriction”.
Gallica Bibliothèque – The non-commercial use of documents or in an academic or scientific publication (publication produced in the context of university research work) is open and free, provided the source is acknowledged. Download from Gallica or order higher resolution.
Others that I’m less familiar with but colleagues have used with ease:
Newberry Library – no permission fees, prompt and reasonably-priced photography service (thanks Paul Salzman for this recommendation)
Glasgow Special Collections – may waive the fees for reproduction of some images on a case by case basis (thanks to Jan Machielsen for the recommendation)
National Gallery of Denmark – (thanks to Erika Gaffney for these Scandinavian recommendations)
Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas – free for books with a print run under 2000 copies and journals with a print run under 10k copies (so basically all academic journals). Service fees for new photography and high res files are reasonable, and you can publish your own image too. (Thanks to Aaron T. Pratt for the suggestion).
Alamy– Good selection of varying quality, make sure the images are 300 dpi and the artwork is out of copyright. Make sure to ask for bulk discounts and to get a quote tailored to your publication for maximum savings (ie. small print journals are sometimes covered by their self-publishing licence).
Bridgeman Images – Professional service and great quality. Can be expensive, always ask for a bulk discount!
Photo RMN du Grand Palais – Search the database for images from French collections. Easy to use, create an account and add the image to trolley. Payment is a little annoying (no online payment service), but staff are very helpful.
V&A Image service– Use if your publication is not covered by the free image use policy. Staff are helpful, make sure to ask for a bulk discount!
Providers that I have not used but have been recommended to me:
Most people do not realise (until they must go through the process) that sourcing rights and permissions for images to use in publications can be a tedious and very expensive process.