Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England: Depicting Dress in Black-Letter Ballads

Description

Fashion featured in black-letter broadside ballads over a hundred years before fashion magazines appeared in England. In the seventeenth century, these single-sheet prints contained rhyming song texts and woodcut pictures, accessible to almost everyone in the country. Dress was a popular subject for ballads, as well as being a commodity with close material and cultural connections to them.This book analyses how the distinctive words and images of these ballads made meaning, both in relation to each other on the ballad sheet and in response to contemporary national events, sumptuary legislation, religious practice, economic theory, the visual arts and literature. In this context, Clare Backhouse argues, seventeenth-century ballads increasingly celebrated the proliferation of print and fashionable dress, envisioning new roles for men and women in terms of fashion consumption and its importance to national prosperity. The book demonstrates how the hitherto overlooked but extensive source material that these ballads offer can enrich the histories of dress, art and culture in early modern England. Cover Half-title Endorsement Title page Copyright information Table of contents Illustrations Citations and abbreviations Introduction 1 Commodities of Print and Dress Producing textiles and paper Wool Silk Cotton Linen Paper Selling textiles and paper Itinerant sellers Pedlars in ballads Pedlars’ commodities Consuming textiles and paper The importance of London Proliferating fashion and print Little luxuries Commodities of print and dress 2 Ballad Comment on Dress Traditional commentary in the 1620s and 30s Social hierarchy Social justice New contexts New narratives after 1680 Shoemakers Tailors Weavers New commentaries: weavers and pro-fashion economics Ballad comment on dress 3 Ballad Pictures Addressing ballad pictures Ballads, books and woodcuts Images in books and ballads The look of ballad sheets Miniatures and bust-length portraits Picturing garments and the ‘heraldic’ convention Drapery and the ‘classical’ convention Draperies into woodcut Resolving the commodity Conventions of clothes and the body 4 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part I Gendering the ‘classical’ convention The armoured body Engendered by war Marital relations and national politics Satirising men’s fashion New courtiers and men about town Wigs: subject or abject Picturing ‘satirical’ men Masculinity, fashion and the defence of the nation 5 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part II ‘Classical’ femininity: bared breasts Who bared their breasts? Ballad breasts: love and devotion Ballad breasts: sexuality Satire on fashion The gendered politics of fashion satire Female bodies, feminine fashions and economic benefits Epilogue New Kinds of Dress Calico Riots and Calico Ballads Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England Notes Select Bibliography Principal ballad collections consulted Select primary sources, published in London (unless otherwise stated) Select secondary sources Acknowledgements Index of Ballad Titles Index