Dressing Up : Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe

Rublack, Ulinka

ISBN 10: 0199645183 / ISBN 13: 9780199645183

Published by Oxford University Press, 2012

About this Item

Dressing Up shows why clothes made history and history can be about clothes. It imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people's appearances: what they wore, how this made them move, what images they created, and how all this made people feel about themselves. Using an astonishing array of sources, Ulinka Rublack argues that an appreciation of people's relationship to appearances and images is essential to an understanding of what it meant to live at this time - and ever since. We read about the head accountant of a sixteenth-century merchant firm who commissioned 136 images of himself elaborately dressed across a lifetime; students arguing with their mother about which clothes they could have; or Nuremberg women wearing false braids dyed red or green. This brilliantly illustrated book draws on a range of insights across the disciplines and allows us to see an entire period in new ways. In integrating its findings into larger arguments about consumption, visual culture, the Reformation, German history, and the relationship of European and global history, it promises to re-shape the field.

Seller Inventory # 97357

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dressing Up : Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0199645183
• ISBN 13: 9780199645183
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Dressing Up shows why clothes made history and history can be about clothes. It imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people's appearances: what they wore, how this made them move, what images they created, and how all this made people feel about themselves.

Using an astonishing array of sources, Ulinka Rublack argues that an appreciation of people's relationship to appearances and images is essential to an understanding of what it meant to live at this time - and ever since. We read about the head accountant of a sixteenth-century merchant firm who commissioned 136 images of himself elaborately dressed across a lifetime; students arguing with their mother about which clothes they could have; or Nuremberg women wearing false braids dyed red or green. This brilliantly illustrated book draws on a range of insights across the disciplines and allows us to see an entire period in new ways. In integrating its findings into larger arguments about consumption, visual culture, the Reformation, German history, and the relationship of European and global history, it promises to re-shape the field.

About the Author

Ulinka Rublack teaches early modern European history at Cambridge University and is a Fellow of St John's College. One of the most original scholars of her generation, she has previously published The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany and Reformation Europe. She is editor of Gender in Early Modern German History and the Oxford University Press Concise Companion to History(2011).