Moving Cloth

Clothes were the most important and expensive properties of an early modern theatre company. The first recorded performances of English professional actors on mainland Europe occurred in the context of a major crisis in the international cloth trade and efforts to form an international Protestant alliance. Known for their extravagant and luxurious clothing, the English Comedians took advantage of existing routes developed for the export and import of cloth. Extant dramatic adaptations of English plays associated with their tradition reflect the vital importance of textile stock to their performances and reception. Their reputation for sartorial extravagance involved the English Comedians in discourses of national loss: in the Holy Roman Empire, as in England, imported fine clothes were linked repeatedly to a diminishment of national treasure. Meanwhile, their comic tradition made extravagant use of the symbolic and physical properties of clothing. Although the formative importance of cloth economies to the early English professional theatre has been widely recognized, this chapter puts that dynamic into an international context for the first time.

Framing Childhood: Representations of Children in Gunnar Lundh’s Photo Agency Archive

Based on Gunnar Lundh’s photographs from the period 1920-1960, this article aims to discuss how a visualisation of children and childhood in cultural history collections can be addressed. This period is known as the time when the Swedish welfare state and society took shape, a period when the conditions for children in society changed in a number of ways. Lundh’s photographs are therefore viewed as cultural expressions of an era of cultural, societal and political change in which photographs of children came to play a particularly important role. Some of Lundh’s pictures have been reproduced in works about the constructive period of the Swedish welfare state and have thereby had an important role in narrating the story of the welfare society. In this way, Lundh’s photographs of children must be understood in the specific context of visual representations of children and childhood from this time period. In the many pictures of children in Lundh’s collection, the children play, are dressed up in fine clothes and national costumes, visit the library, pick flowers, play along the shore, etc. The children are depicted both active and passive, innocent, childish and pure. In that sense, the photographs follow a genre-specific way to portray children which was typical at the time and still is. In the article, I argue that an understanding and a specific way of seeing and portraying children and childhood became institutionalised during this period. However, in this institutionalisation process of images of childhood, Lundh’s pictures of children seem to reproduce and enhance this “pictorial vocabulary” in many ways that appear natural to childhood.

Chapter 14

Suddenly Nana disappeared from view: she went under again, she fled, she took off to strange places. Before she left she had endured a stressful sale of the mansion, throwing out everything, including the furniture, jewels, fine clothes, and linen. Figures were bandied about,...

Neither Gold nor Braided Hair (1 Timothy 2.9; 1 Peter 3.3): Adornment, Gender and Honour in Antiquity

This article examines the relationships between adornment, gender and honour in the Graeco-Roman world in order to provide a broad context for understanding the attempts to curtail women's adornment in 1 Tim 2.9 and 1 Pet 3.3. It argues that while many male writers criticize women who adorn themselves, often accusing such women of luxuria, not all women shared such a perspective. Rather, women may well have valued jewellery, fine clothes and elaborate hair as means of conveying status and honour, and as important forms of economic power. These factors require consideration when attempting to understand why the authors of 1 Timothy and 1 Peter counsel women to avoid gold, pearls, braided hair and fine clothing.

DR. TOBIAS SMOLLETT ON THE EVILS OF URBANIZATION (1771)

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771), usually remembered as a brilliant novelist, was also a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He published a number of satirical novels on English social life. In one of these, The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771), Smollett described how urbanization was changing London as follows: But notwithstanding the improvements, the capital is become an overgrown monster; which, like a dropsical head, will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support. The absurdity will appear in its full force, when we consider, that one sixth part of the natives of this whole extensive kingdom, is crowded within the bills of mortality. What wonder that our villages are depopulated and our farms in want of day-labourers? The abolition of small farms is but one cause in the decrease of population. Indeed, the incredible increases in horses and black cattle to answer the purposes of luxury, requires a prodigious quantity of hay and grass, which are raised and managed without much labour; but a number of hands will always be wanted for the different branches of agriculture, whether the farms be large or small. The tide of luxury has swept all the inhabitants from the open country. The poor squire, as well as the rich peer, must have his house in town, and make a figure with an extraordinary number of domestics. The plough-boys, cow-herds and lower-hinds are debauched and seduced by the appearance and discourse of those coxcombs in livery, when they make their summer excursions. They desert their dirt and drudgery, and swarm up to London in hopes of getting into service, where they can live luxuriously and wear fine clothes, without being obliged to work; for idleness is natural to man.