The World in Dress
Costume Books across Italy, Europe, and the East

This Element shows how costume books and albums helped to shape a new visual culture in the early modern period.

Giulia Calvi (Author)

9781108823302, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 September 2022

75 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.6 cm, 0.165 kg

In the early modern period costume books and albums participated in the shaping of a new visual culture that displayed the diversity of the people of the known world on a variety of media including maps, atlases, screens, and scrolls. At the crossroads of early anthropology, geography, and travel literature, this textual and visual production blurred the lines between art and science. Costume books and albums were not a unique European production: in the Ottoman Empire and the Far East artists and geographers also pictured the dress of men and women of their own and faraway lands hybridizing the Renaissance western tradition. Acknowledging this circulation of knowledge and people through migration, travel, missionary and diplomatic encounters, this Element contributes to the expanding field of early modern cultural studies in a global perspective.

1. Staging the Clothing of the Early Modern World
2. The Ottoman Empire
3. Italy, Europe, and Japan
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Material culture [JFCD], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]