Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe, by Ulinka Rublack

Abstract

Ulinka Rublack’s original and richly detailed study of Renaissance dress adds significantly to the growing body of cultural history which takes as its central premise the concept of ‘materialism’ as a structuring force within early modern society. She argues that an increasing availability, variety and complexity of clothing, no less than other material goods, made it a significant constituent of Renaissance culture, a vehicle which could signal or construct identity in ways that helped to foster new and essentially modern notions of the self. New freedoms in respect of clothing, as well as new knowledge about the costumes of people around the world, disseminated via popular woodcut-illustrated ‘costume books’, helped to alter the ways individuals and communities saw themselves and each other and to ‘objectify’ their sense of self for the first time. Just as naturalists such as Conrad Gessner were mapping out the animal and plant world in illustrated volumes, these costume books—a genre Rublack fruitfully plumbs throughout the book—encouraged a comparable ethnographic interest in peoples, local as well as exotic.