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

by Clare Backhouse

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784538378
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/30/2017
Series:	Dress Cultures
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Clare Backhouse received her Doctorate from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has taught undergraduates at Oxford University and MA students at the Courtauld and the Victoria & Albert Museum. She is a contributor to Printed Images in Early Modern Britain (2010).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations vi

Citations and Abbreviations x

Introduction 1

1 Commodities of Print and Dress 9

2 Ballad Comment on Dress 43

3 Ballad Pictures: Conventions of Clothes and the Body 84

4 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part I: Masculinity, Fashion and the Defence of the Nation 126

5 Classical Ideals and Satirical Deviations, Part II: Female Bodies, Feminine Fashions and Economic Benefits 158

Epilogue 191

Notes 203

Select Bibliography 226

Acknowledgements 245

Index of Ballad Titles 248

Index 250

Editorial Reviews

This book is a must–have for seventeenth century dress historians. To those already familiar with the dress of the period, this is an excellent supplement. This book would also be of interest to anyone interested in the relationship of dress and print culture in any period.” —Jourbanal of Dress History

From the Publisher