The Greatness in Good Clothes: Fashioning Subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s Urania and Margaret Spencer’s Account Book (BL Additional MS 62092)

Abstract

Despite the long-standing and often derogatory connection of women to fashion, we still know little of how women in seventeenth-century England regarded their clothes.1 Research into historical patterns of female consumption — a field that often encompasses dress — has been more interested in the eighteenth century, probably because of the dramatic rise in consumer goods in that period.2 Costume historians and literary scholars have instigated analyses of pre-eighteenth century English clothing, but their approaches, through the materials of dress and cross-dressing respectively, have not necessarily been conducive to understanding how women actually inhabited their clothes. Recent studies have, however, begun to redress this. Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (2000), the essays on clothing in Material London (2000), Susan Vincent’s Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (2003) and Roze Hentschell’s The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England: Textual Constructions of a National Identity (2008) for instance, pursue issues of economics, memory, nationalism and politics in the history of fashion.3 Yet, while these works are mindful of gender, they attend to only limited evidence produced by early modern women themselves.4KeywordsEast India CompanyGender HierarchyClothing ProductionAccount BookClothing FashionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.