Accessorizing The Renaissance Body Conference: Paper Abstracts

 

Elizabeth Blake

“Renaissance Dildos and Accessories: The Functions of Early Modern Strap-Ons”

Accessories, traditionally understood, are a kind of decoration—added to the exterior and necessarily supplementary—while the functions that accessories serve are often overlooked or misunderstood. This paper will draw on literary and historical documents from the early modern period, as well as current research on early modern material culture, to analyze the Renaissance dildo, an accessory whose functions cannot be ignored. The dildo, when worn for long periods of time, was sometimes used as a fetishistic or prosthetic surrogate for the male organ that was not there, constructing females as masculine and allowing them to pass as men. But in many surviving accounts, what we find is not (or not only) a description of wearing a surrogate for the male penis, but the experience of wearing a dildo – that is, the experience of putting on a functional, pleasurable object just coming into cultural visibility in the early modern period. The paper will show that an investigation of the early modern dildo is important for understanding not just the relations of material objects to sexualities, but also the functional roles of accessories in early modern England.

Will Fisher

“‘Had it a codpiece, ’twere a man indeed’: The Codpiece as a Constitutive Accessory”

One of the most striking accessories of dress in early modern England was the codpiece. This “vain and unglorious model of a member” was first introduced in the early fifteenth century, and at that time it usually took the form of a bag-like triangular frontispiece that covered the genital area of men's hose or breeches. Over the course of the next two centuries, however, it also came to take the form of an ornate—sometimes even jewel-encrusted—phallic protrusion. This conspicuous accessory was the subject of much discussion and debate during the Renaissance. Even after it went out of fashion at the end of the sixteenth century, it did not completely disappear from the cultural imaginary: indeed, Henry VIII’s codpiece was on display in the Tower of London throughout much of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, attracting attention and comments. The main contention of this essay is that the codpiece was not simply a frivolous accessory. Immediately, it helped to constitute gender identity, but in addition, and most importantly, the different physical manifestations of the codpiece helped to constitute different modes, or ideologies, of masculinity. Thus, the two forms of the codpiece worked to figure the male genitalia as distinctly phallic or distinctly scrotal, and hence worked to emphasize either primarily sexuality (i.e. penetration) or reproduction. At the same time, however, the detachability of this object added yet another layer of complexity to the situation. It meant, most crucially, that these ideologies were necessarily subject to dislocation, appropriation, change, and rearticulation.

Beth Holman

“Papal Dress and Accessories in the Renaissance”

On Pope Benedict XVI’s arrival in Washington, D. C. this spring, American newspapers featured articles about his dress, from his red leather shoes to the way he wore the pallium. Some have interpreted these as a political statement about a return to a more traditional Church. But for centuries, papal dress and ornament, from head (tiara) to toes (sandals), has been fundamental to the display of pontifical status, authority, and identity. Each item was imbued with political, personal, and dynastic as well as religious significance, sustained by traditional and contemporary rituals. Some were specifically liturgical, while others had analogies in the dress and accessories of secular rulers. The tiara, the papal crown supposedly bestowed by Emperor Constantine, changed shape in the later Middle Ages to assume its current triple form—symbolizing political, temporal, and pastoral supremacy. As the pope’s secular crown, in distinction to the miter, where and when it was worn became significant.

This paper will discuss elements of Renaissance papal dress and accessories, set by tradition and contemporary political and personal agendas. We are fortunate to have a variety of sources for this period, not only portraits and images of popes in a variety of media, but also inventories, descriptions of ceremonies, treatises on papal dress and ornament, and the diaries of the papal Masters of Ceremony such as Paride Grassis and Biagio da Cesena (who make clear, for instance, that Popes Julius II and Clement VII asserted personal prerogative by wearing the tiara when the miter was traditional, or lamented that Leo X left without his papal sandals, necessary for foot-kissing.) I will also analyze some specific examples of ornament, such as the papal morse (brooch), whose origin in Aaron’s breastplate has not been examined in terms of how the notion of armor and its location at the chest may have influenced the design and possible meanings of its images and gems. Such items were signs not only of the office, but also political, personal, and dynastic identity. Cellini’s gold and gem-studded morse for Clement VII, commissioned after the Sack of Rome, featured God the Father enthroned on a large diamond, with various gems set around the perimeter, all supported by cherubim. In addition to their intrinsic value (carefully recorded), gems had symbolic meaning, as well as apotropaic, medical significance. Denise Allen pointed out that the prominent diamond in the center would have been read as a Medici emblem when worn by a Medici pope (Clement VII). I argue that the innovative design by Cellini converted the diamond into a Cathedra Petri—literally, a throne of stone—one of the most important symbols of papal authority, which been severely damaged by the recent Sack of Rome, imprisonment and exile of the pope.

Ann Rosalind Jones

“Busks and Bodices: The Bound Renaissance Body”

In early modern Europe, a stylish body whether masculine or feminine was shaped by a bodice (a word derived from “bodies,” meaning the two halves of a corset) and by a busk. Laced into the bodice to stiffen it, made of wood, metal, whalebone or ivory and sometimes inscribed with emblems and epigrams, the busk was an intimate yet public accessory, invisible to view yet present in shared fantasies of erotic and anxious kinds. Imagined as joining, de-sexing or re-sexing conventionally gendered bodies, these stiffeners became the subject of gallant and fantastically satirical texts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. Focusing on writing from 1500 to 1660, this talk will analyze the disorderly complex of social meanings attached to the busk.

Natasha Korda

“‘Stiff and Starchy’ Accessories: Froes, Rebatoes and Other ‘Outlandish Comodityes’”

This paper looks at how the starched linen accessories (primarily luxury neckwear and head-attires) manufactured by immigrant craftswomen in early modern London were staged in plays mounted during a period of massive immigration from the Low Countries (i.e. during the Dutch Revolt and the French wars of religion). My focus is on stagings of starched accessories that refer to their dramatic pre- or off-stage histories of manufacture. The paper will address a number of questions raised by the staging of starched accessories: to what extent were theatergoers aware of the material culture or “stuff” of the stage in general as something “worked upon” (to borrow Marx’s formulation)? Under what circumstances did stage props and costumes point to or “recollect” the domains of labor and praxis—that is, to social relations of production? In the case of the starched, linen accessories manufactured by alien women, this line of inquiry will lead us beyond a strictly Marxian paradigm, to ask: in what ways were the off-stage dramas of economic production recollected in plays marked by gender, national identity, and the social dynamics of immigration? The stiff and starchy accessories manufactured by alien craftswomen took on a variety of cultural associations in plays of the period: their whiteness was associated with Dutch women’s sexual purity or chastity, and their renown as paragons of domestic virtue, while their stiffness came to “stand,” as it were, as emblematic of Dutch women’s overly assertive, “masculine” shrewishness as economic agents, and of their sexual promiscuity. The paper attempts to place these seemingly trivial fashion accessories in a broader economic landscape, viewing the theatrical staging of accessories as complex comments on gender, labor, immigration and national identity.

Joseph Loewenstein

“Hamlet's Mourning Garment”

The idea of the agency of things is not new and the various causes of its various recurrences to intellectual glamour repay scrutiny. This essay will survey that intellectual history, but will settle its attention on an important (if now unfashionable) central theme within that history, the idea that clothes make men and women. Indeed it will narrow its attention further to examine the extent to which clothes and accessories performed the social and affective work of mourning in the early modern period. The central question under scrutiny will be, “What does it mean to say that garments mourn?” and that question will be referred specifically to and informed especially by Hamlet’s inky cloak.

Bella Mirabella

“Embellishing Herself with a Cloth: The Double Life of the Handkerchief”

The handkerchief in early modern Europe was a complex object carrying with it multiple, yet contradictory uses, both emblematic of virtue while reminiscent of filth and transgression. The elusiveness of such a piece of cloth, highly intimate one minute, functioning as a receptacle for bodily fluids, and very public the next, used as a medium of monetary exchange in a mountebank performance, signals the power of this highly charged bit of cloth as well as its troubling role in the performance of gender. An examination of the handkerchief both in the larger culture of Italy and England and on the stage reveals the oxymoronic uses of this accessory which parallel the contradictory and oxymoronic roles women played, roles which allowed them to negotiate the female self between the public and private spheres.

Karen Newman

“Accessories and the Sartorial Economy of Secondariness”

Clothing plays an important symbolic role in Shakespeare’s Richard II and the anonymous Woodstock with which it is often linked. Recent work on dress and clothing in Elizabethan and Jacobean England has focused on sartorial extravagance, on the development of fashion, on conspicuous consumption among the elite, and on fashion trespassing by actors and the socially aspirant. How the majority of the population, which experienced downward mobility and for whom fashion was inaccessible, dressed has been largely ignored. In Act I of Richard II, when Bushy enters announcing that Gaunt is grievous sick, the king notoriously wishes him quickly dead in order to finance the wars in Ireland: “the lining of his coffers shall make coats/To deck our soldiers for these Irish wars” (60-61). Richard’s soldiers are in need of coats, as the poor so frequently were in Richard’s day, and as they were in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What can be said about sartorial economy, even sartorial penury, in early modern English culture? This paper considers unfashionable clothing, the coarse shirts and smocks, loose coats and jerkins, rough bands and hose, of russet, kersey, buckram, homespun, buff and scotch cloth, frieze and indifferent knit, that were the common dress of the large majority of the early modern English population occasionally represented on the English stage. How was such cloth and the clothing made from it registered in English writing of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, particularly in Shakespeare’s Richard II and the anonymous Woodstock? What is the relation of cloth and clothing to style?

Eugenia Paulicelli

“From the Sacred to the Secular: The Gendered Geography of Veils in Italian Cinquecento Fashion”

This paper will draw attention to the veil, and how its uses and styles were crucial markers of gender, identity, and geographical and cultural differences. The habit of covering the head in public space was a widespread custom for women both in the West and in the East. Although its color and consistency differed greatly, the Madonna as represented in paintings, the matron, courtesans and virgins all shared the use of the veil. Following its meanings from symbol of chastity to symbol of sin and seduction, I focus on some of the multiple contradictory meanings the veil assumed in the Italian Cinquecento. In particular, I will consider writings on love and conduct that incorporate dress and appearance with specific references to the veil in their prescription of gender and class (Mario Equicola, Di Natura d’amore; Giacomo Lentieri, Della Economica; Silvio Antoniano, Della Educazione Christiana dei figlioli). In addition, specific references and examples will be drawn from Cesare Vecellio and Giacomo Franco’s costume books, and from paintings by Raffaello, Tiziano, Guido Reni and Lavinia Fontana. The initial purpose of the veil was that of signaling modesty or as Tertullian (De Cultu Foeminarum) had written “a little helmet of the virgins, an armor of honesty.” Its function is reinforced in sixteenth century treatises that emphasize temperance, control of passions, and chastity. However, this initial meaning of the veil was contradicted by several factors that went hand in hand with it. Greater demand for the fabric was met by greater production to satisfy the different uses individual women made of it in various historical and geographical circumstances. The veil was, in fact, made of one of the fabrics produced in Italy, and Bologna, in particular, had distinguished itself for the production of a very fine voile (il velo crespo bolognese). This was one of the most desired fabrics used to accessorize both women’s dress and headgear, and to complement male headgear. The veil came in different colors; white for married and unmarried women, black for widows and nuns, yellow for courtesans. We might recall the case of Tullia d’Aragona. She refused to wear the “velo giallo” and wrote, with the help of Benedetto Varchi, a petition to Cosimo I de’ Medici, husband of Eleonora di Toledo in which she asked to be exempted (she won).

As with other accessories, the veil represented a way of creatively complementing other parts of dress or emphasizing other parts of the body, like the exposed breast in a provoking cleavage. As described by moralists and shown in paintings and illustrations, women covered their heads and faces with veils while at the same time drawing attention to their cleavage. While this way of “misusing” the veil was obviously condemned by the moralizing literature on conduct, it testified, all the same to the success of an accessory that became part of fashion, transforming the sacred into the secular. This also brings to the fore the key roles accessories play in fashion and on how they can actually transform the meanings of dress and the presentation of the self. The veil, long or short, was refashioned, manipulated and performed, becoming a dynamic element of dress. It took on various forms to meet the needs of the style of dress it accompanied and the body of the wearer. This act of fashioning through the interplay between dress and accessories defines the language of fashion, and the culture of appearance in a given space that becomes in turn both political and gendered.

Karen Raber

“Chains of Pearls: Gender, Property, Identity”

Early modern women loved their pearls. Most portraits of Elizabeth I demonstrate her well-documented obsession with pearls; as signifiers of chastity and purity, they were an appropriate jewel for the Virgin Queen, but a host of other women of the period adored pearls as much as did the queen, sought them, bartered for them, cherished them, and proudly wore them (or occasionally pawned or sold them) as a valued part of their wardrobes. In Rowland Lockley’s 1592 portrait, Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury, is portrayed in a heavy multiple strand of pearls, set against a sober black dress that plays up their remarkable weight and length; Bess purchased each pearl in this necklace individually over time, suggesting her obsession was no less than Elizabeth’s. Marcus Gheerarts’ 1595 “Portrait of an Unknown Lady,” depicts a pregnant woman wearing a luminous net of pearls from head to toe, to convey both her purity and her fertility. Portraits of the period, then, reflect a generalized fascination with pearls, and a particular link between pearls and women. Literature confirms the association, from the Pearl Poet’s maiden, to Othello’s reference to Desdemona as a “pearl . . . richer than all his tribe.” This traditional connection between pearls and female virtue also undergirds Diana Primrose’s seventeenth-century poetic tribute to Queen Elizabeth, “A Chain of Pearle.”

In this essay, I examine at length the complex symbolic and metaphoric relationships between pearls and women, primarily as these intersect with the materiality of the actual pearl and the exchange of pearls as property. Signifiers of sexual containment and purity, objects of adornment that were made more valuable by their very fragility, targets of competitive bidding or dynastic inheritance among royal women, items that might be included among a woman’s “paraphernalia” and so belong to her outright, marriage gifts or components of dowries, and a jewel designed to tempt or obligate royal patrons—pearls were all these things. Yet, as some early modern observers had begun to understand, they were also the product of a fairly ugly process, the application of layers of nacre within an oyster in response to contamination by grit. Even without this specialized knowledge, early moderns might equally have associated pearls with lust and venery, unappetizing bodily functions and body parts, greed, and excesses of consumption. Such disjunctions between its origins and social and economic value, and among its symbolic registers, allow the pearl to mobilize a rich set of interpretive possibilities, but also make the pearl a dangerously unstable accessory to meaning. This essay foregrounds that tension, with special attention to its gendered components, throughout its analysis of the pearl’s appearance in early modern history, paintings, and literature.

Adam Smyth

“Functional Ornaments: Wearing Early Modern Scissors”

In this article I wish to examine scissors as an early modern accessory: that is, as a small object, or prop, that might form part of an elite woman's costume and, therefore, contribute towards the piecing together of a female identity. Francis Davison's A Poetical Rapsodie (1611) includes a description of 'A Lottery presented before the late Queenes Maiestie at the Lord Chancellors house. 1601', in which 'the fairest Ladies that euer I saw' were awarded 'these few trifles': 'A Purse'; 'A Looking Glasse'; 'A Hand-kerchiefe'; 'A paire of Gloues'; 'A Necklace'; and 'A paire of Sizzers'. But if scissors seem, here, to belong to a world of decorous and aestheticized court ritual – presented as gifts, worn from an elaborate chain affixed to a chatelaine hook on a belt – I want to explore how other, more troubling, connotations attach themselves to scissors. Specifically, I want to examine a quartet of problematic associations: functionalism (scissors are linked with labor, craft, trade); transience and death (scissors are in part associated with Atropos, cutting the thread of life); female sexual looseness ( through an association with supposedly lascivious tailors and seamstresses); and violence and emasculation (conveyed most vividly in early modern reworkings of the Samson and Dalilah narrative, which introduced scissors to the narrative and focused on the danger of cutting).

When scissors are put to work, they produce more than is required: they cut, and they create an excess, something that needs to be (but sometimes cannot be) left behind. This dynamic is important for our reading of scissors in early modern culture: scissors might be an elite accessory, but they also produce other, potentially problematic connotations, particularly with regard to the women who used them and wore them.

Jane Tylus

“The Garment of Translation”

Toward the end of his life, Francesco Petrarca translated into Latin the final story from Boccaccio’s Decameron. This is the tale of Griselda, the impoverished girl who is married to the noble Gualtieri and who exhibits extraordinary patience in the face of her husband’s tests. In his prefatory letter to the translation, Petrarch tells Boccaccio that he has “changed the garment of the Italian” by “clothing” his tale in Latin. Undoubtedly, the metaphor springs to mind because of Griselda herself, twice forced to strip nude in public: the first time when she puts off her rustic garment to put on the elegant ones given her by Gualtieri, the second when the heartless Gualtieri sends her back to her father without anything but a shift.

Clothing becomes indicative of locale, but it also has some impact on Griselda, who once she finds herself in her husband’s court, seems more courtly and refined than any of the other people there. Or, as Boccaccio says of her when she is first dressed in courtly clothes, “with these new garments, she changed both her nature and her habits.” And as Chaucer will subsequently say when he translated the tale into English, “Griselde translated was in syche riches.”

What exactly does the garment of Latin do to the character of Griselda herself, as well as to the original, Italian tale? How can translation in early modern Europe be seen as imparting a kind of clothing—perhaps even an ornament or accessory, like the jewels in which Griselda is also decked? And in turn, of what relevance is the fact that Petrarch addresses several of his own Italian canzoni as rustic and nude, unable to “uscir del bosco e gir infra la gente” — leave the woods and go out among the people—because they had insufficient “ornamenti”: ornaments, decoration, frills?

In this paper, I will pursue the relationship between the “vulgar” Italian and the clothing or “ornamenti” that Latin can supposedly confer. More generally, I will think about meanings of translation in early modernity as it is theorized in sartorial terms not only by Petrarch but by contemporaries such as Leonardo Bruni, whose treatise is the first renaissance work on translation.

Evelyn Welch

“Perfumed Buttons and Scented Gloves: Smelling Things in Renaissance Italy”

When testifying before the Roman court in 1559, the Sienese courtesan, “Camilla the Skinny” described how she had come to the home of a long-standing client. On entering she had immediately cried out, “Oh, what stinks, Oh, what stinks,” an exclamation that another prostitute in the room, Pasqua took personally. The trial proved complex, but in denying a later attack, Camilla argued that she had not been referring to Pasqua as “stinky,” but to the “garland of musk” that her lover wore in his hat.

This essay uses this tale to examine the practices of perfuming accessories such as hats, gloves, buttons, belts, shoes and all forms of jewelry in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. To do so, it explores concepts of the body as permeable, above all to smell. Smell was conceptualized very differently in the Renaissance period than it is today. Perfuming was thought of as protective but also as problematic. Strong scents “heated” the air around the body, shielding orifices from disease-inducing pathogenic vapors. At the same time, perfumes might dull the senses, invite lascivious or effeminate behavior or even poison the wearer. Nonetheless, the many forms of perfumed items proved very popular, particularly filigree buttons that wafted scent around the body. But their use also provoked anxieties as musk, civet and ambergris embedded goods circulated in every increasing numbers in early modern Europe.