Download or read book The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England written by Roze Hentschell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-16 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through its exploration of the intersections between the culture of the wool broadcloth industry and the literature of the early modern period, this study contributes to the expanding field of material studies in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. The author argues that it is impossible to comprehend the development of emerging English nationalism during that time period, without considering the culture of the cloth industry. She shows that, reaching far beyond its status as a commodity of production and exchange, that industry was also a locus for organizing sentiments of national solidarity across social and economic divisions. Hentschell looks to textual productions-both imaginative and non-fiction works that often treat the cloth industry with mythic importance-to help explain how cloth came to be a catalyst for nationalism. Each chapter ties a particular mode, such as pastoral, prose romance, travel propaganda, satire, and drama, with a specific issue of the cloth industry, demonstrating the distinct work different literary genres contributed to what the author terms the 'culture of cloth'.

Download or read book Sweet and Clean written by Susan North and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-03-26 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweet and Clean? challenges the widely held beliefs on bathing and cleanliness in the past. For over thirty years, the work of the French historian, George Vigarello, has been hugely influential on early modern European social history, describing an aversion to water and bathing, and the use of linen underwear as the sole cleaning agent for the body. However, these concepts do not apply to early modern England. Sweet and Clean? analyses etiquette and medical literature, revealing repeated recommendations to wash or bathe in order to clean the skin. Clean linen was essential for propriety but advice from medical experts was contradictory. Many doctors were convinced that it prevented the spread of contagious diseases, but others recommended flannel for undergarments, and a few thought changing a fever patient's linens was dangerous. The methodology of material culture helps determine if and how this advice was practiced. Evidence from inventories, household accounts and manuals, and surviving linen garments tracks underwear through its life-cycle of production, making, wearing, laundering, and final recycling. Although the material culture of washing bodies is much sparser, other sources, such as the Old Bailey records, paint a more accurate picture of cleanliness in early modern England than has been previously described. The contrasting analyses of linen and bodies reveal what histories material culture best serves. Finally, what of the diseases-plague, smallpox, and typhus-that cleanliness of body and clothes were thought to prevent? Did following early modern medical advice protect people from these illnesses?

Download or read book A Companion to Textile Culture written by Jennifer Harris and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-09-16 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.

Download or read book Gun Culture in Early Modern England written by Lois G. Schwoerer and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-05-30 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guns had an enormous impact on the social, economic, cultural, and political lives of civilian men, women, and children of all social strata in early modern England. In this study, Lois Schwoerer identifies and analyzes England’s domestic gun culture from 1500 to 1740, uncovering how guns became available, what effects they had on society, and how different sectors of the population contributed to gun culture. The rise of guns made for recreational use followed the development of a robust gun industry intended by King Henry VIII to produce artillery and handguns for war. Located first in London, the gun industry brought the city new sounds, smells, street names, shops, sights, and communities of gun workers, many of whom were immigrants. Elite men used guns for hunting, target shooting, and protection. They collected beautifully decorated guns, gave them as gifts, and included them in portraits and coats-of-arms, regarding firearms as a mark of status, power, and sophistication. With statutes and proclamations, the government legally denied firearms to subjects with an annual income under £100—about 98 percent of the population—whose reactions ranged from grudging acceptance to willful disobedience. Schwoerer shows how this domestic gun culture influenced England’s Bill of Rights in 1689, a document often cited to support the claim that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution conveys the right to have arms as an Anglo-American legacy. Schwoerer shows that the Bill of Rights did not grant a universal right to have arms, but rather a right restricted by religion, law, and economic standing, terms that reflected the nation's gun culture. Examining everything from gunmakers’ records to wills, and from period portraits to toy guns, Gun Culture in Early Modern England offers new data and fresh insights on the place of the gun in English society.

Download or read book Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England written by Susan Dwyer Amussen and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining the work of major scholars on both sides of the Atlantic this volume seeks to explore the interconnections between popular culture and political activism at both the local and central levels. Strongly influenced by the work of David Underdown, the contributions range across a spectrum of social and political history from witchcraft to the aristocracy, from forest riots to battles of the civil war. The volume combines chapters from historians of gender, of political theory, of social structure, and of high politics. Within this diversity, the contributors offer a cohesive approach to the study of early modern England, encouraging the exploration of mentalities and political activities, as well as artistic rendering, writing and ceremony within the widest context of cultural politics.

Download or read book Women Beauty and Power in Early Modern England written by Edith Snook and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-03-08 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what ways skin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals.

Download or read book Clothing and Queer Style in Early Modern English Drama written by James M. Bromley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines early modern drama's depiction of non-standard forms of masculinity grounded in superficiality, inauthenticity, affectation, and the display of the extravagantly clothed body. Practices of extravagant dress destabilized distinctions between able-bodied and disabled, human and non-human, and the past and present, distinctions that structure normative ways of thinking about sexuality. In city comedies by Ben Jonson, George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Dekker, extravagantly dressed male characters imagine alternatives to the prevailing modes of subjectivity, sociability, and eroticism in early modern London. While these characters are situated in hostile narrative and historical contexts, this book draws on recent work on disability, materiality, and queer temporality to rethink their relationship to those contexts in order to access the world-making possibilities of early modern queer style. In their rich representations of life in London around the turn of the seventeenth century, these plays not only were, but also remain, uniquely sensitive to the intersection of sexuality, urbanization, and material culture. The attachments and pleasures of early modern sartorial extravagance they depict can estrange us from the epistemologies that narrow current thinking about sexuality's relationship to authenticity, pedagogy, interiority, and privacy.

Download or read book Travel and Drama in Early Modern England written by Claire Jowitt and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers new ways to conceptualize the relationship between early modern travel and drama, and re-assesses how travel drama is defined.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Law in the Early Modern Age written by Peter Goodrich and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Opened up by the revival of Classical thought but riven by the violence of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, the terrain of Early Modern law was constantly shifting. The age of expansion saw unparalleled degrees of internal and external exploration and colonization, accompanied by the advance of science and the growing power of knowledge. A Cultural History of Law in the Early Modern Age, covering the period from 1500 to 1680, explores the war of jurisdictions and the slow and contested emergence of national legal traditions in continental Europe and in Britannia. Most particularly, the chapters examine the European quality of the Western legal traditions and seek to link the political project of Anglican common law, the mos britannicus, to its classical European language and context. Drawing upon a wealth of textual and visual sources, A Cultural History of Law in the Early Modern Age presents essays that examine key cultural case studies of the period on the themes of justice, constitution, codes, agreements, arguments, property and possession, wrongs, and the legal profession.

Download or read book Women Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe written by Susan Broomhall and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the contradictory forces shaping women's identities and experiences, this collection examines the possibilities for commonalities and the forces of division between women in early modern Europe. The contributors analyse the critical power of gender to structure identities and experiences, adding new depth to our understanding of early modern women's senses of exclusion and belonging.

Download or read book Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary written by Tara Zanardi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-04 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary investigates the pictorial representation of types from the sixteenth to the twenty- first century. Originating in longstanding visual traditions, including street crier prints and costume albums, these images share certain conventions as they seek to convey knowledge about different peoples. The genre of the type became widespread in the early modern period, developing into a global language of identity. The chapters explore diverse pictorial representations of types, customs, and dress in numerous media, including paintings, prints, postcards, photographs, and garments. Together, they reveal that the activation of typological strategies, including seriality, repetition, appropriation, and subversion has produced a universal and dynamic pictorial language. Typological images highlight the tensions between the local and the international, the specific and the communal, and similarity and difference inherent in the construction of identity. The first full- length study to treat these images as a broader genre, Visual Typologies gives voice to a marginalized form of representation. Together, the chapters debunk the classification of such images as unmediated and authentic representations, offering fresh methodological frameworks to consider their meanings locally and globally, and establishing common ground about the operations of objects that sought to shape, embody, or challenge individual and collective identities.

Download or read book Providence in Early Modern England written by Alexandra Walsham and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an extensive study of the 16th and 17th century belief that God actively intervened in human affairs to punish, reward, warn, try and chastise. It seeks to shed light on the reception, character and broader cultural repercussions of the Reformation.

Download or read book The Invention of China in Early Modern England written by Jonathan E. Lux and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Invention of China in Early Modern England describes how several different English communities became aware of China. It begins by describing how early modern intellectuals used the utopian ideal of China to license all kinds of progressive innovation before chronicling how England’s growing commerce in southeast Asia radically changed China’s representation in the English discourse community. For the new community of English merchants proposing to trade in Chinese goods, China became the seminal example in the growing discourse community of English Orientalism. It was an absolute or arbitrary authoritarian state, associated with crooked business dealings, and cloaked in a rhetoric of secrecy and exclusion—a dangerous exception to the traditions, values, and identities of the emergent English speaking states. Finally, the book points out some of the ways that contemporary English language sources continue to represent this early modern English thought tradition, labelling the complexities of modern China with analytical vocabulary perhaps better suited to the pressing political anxieties of the seventeenth century.

Download or read book The Acoustic World of Early Modern England written by Bruce R. Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-04-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journeying into the sound-worlds of Shakespeare's contemporaries, this text explores the physical aspects of human speech and the surrounding environment, as well as social and political structures.

Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary examination of current research on popular culture in the early modern era. For the first time a detailed yet wide-ranging consideration of the breadth and scope of early modern popular culture in England is collected in one volume, highlighting the interplay of 'low' and 'high' modes of cultural production (while also questioning the validity of such terminology). The authors examine how popular culture impacted upon people's everyday lives during the period, helping to define how individuals and groups experienced the world. Issues as disparate as popular reading cultures, games, food and drink, time, textiles, religious belief and superstition, and the function of festivals and rituals are discussed. This research companion will be an essential resource for scholars and students of early modern history and culture.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Renaissance written by Elizabeth Currie and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spurred by an increasingly international and competitive market, the Renaissance saw the development of many new fabrics and the use of highly prized ingredients imported from the New World. In response to a thirst for the new, fashion's pace of change accelerated, the production of garments provided employment for an increasingly significant proportion of the working population, and entrepreneurial artisans began to transform even the most functional garments into fashionable ones. Anxieties concerning vanity and the power of clothing to mask identities heightened fears of fashion's corrupting influence, and heralded the great age of sumptuary legislation intended to police status and gender through dress. Drawing on sources from surviving garments to artworks to moralising pamphlets, this richly illustrated volume presents essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, and visual and literary representations to illustrate the diversity and cultural significance of dress and fashion in the period.

Download or read book Shakespeare and Domestic Life written by Sandra Clark and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dictionary explores the language of domestic life found in Shakespeare's work and seeks to demonstrate the meanings he attaches to it through his uses of it in particular contexts. "Domestic life" covers a range of topics: the language of the household, clothing, food, family relationships and duties; household practices, the architecture of the home, and all that conditions and governs the life of the home. The dictionary draws on recent cultural materialist research to provide in-depth definitions of the domestic language and life in Shakespeare's works, creating a richly rewarding and informative reference tool for upper level students and scholars.