Women’s Fashions and Politics in Seventeenth-Century Spain: The Rise and Fall of the Guardainfante *
Abstract Women’s clothes were at the center of political debate in the Spain of Philip IV (r. 1621–65), and no garment inspired more controversy than the wide-hipped farthingale, or hoopskirt, known as the guardainfante. Considered scandalous with its reputation for hiding illicit pregnancies, the guardainfante was banned in 1639. Nonetheless, the guardainfante became more popular than ever and turned into an enduring icon of Golden Age Spain during the reign of Philip’s second queen, Mariana of Austria (1649–65). Despite the guardainfante’s high level of visibility, most notably in court portraits by Diego Velázquez, very little is known about the historical experiences of the women who wore it. This article demonstrates that real women really did wear the guardainfante in a variety of contexts outside of portraiture and the theater. In Madrid and in cities throughout the Spanish empire, women of different stations and convictions participated in the political culture of their times by making, disseminating, and debating this controversial garment.
Women, Bridal Girdles, and the Household in Renaissance Prague
Abstract This article addresses early modern women's power through an object study of the wedding girdle, a thickly embellished belt that was the most costly, emblematic, and intimate item in a Renaissance bride's trousseau, and which uniquely illuminates the lives of women. Building on the work that women's history has done to uncover how women navigated the patriarchal system, I propose that a focus on the household is vital to understanding the socially specific ways in which burgher women – members of the citizen class of Renaissance Prague – exerted agency in their daily lives. Burgher sensibilities, specifically the desire to display the prosperity, industry, and piety of their households, created distinct mechanisms for women to assert themselves. This article sets women's lives against the interwoven structures of the household, namely, gendered roles and expectations, the legal property system, and moral discourses surrounding marriage. By levering these structures, the same that constrained them, burgher women were able to express power.
Governance of the consuming passions : a history of sumptuary law
List of Tables - Acknowledgements - Preface - Why Study Sumptuary Law? - A Short History of Sumptuary Law - Tilting Against the Windmills of Fashion? - 'As if God Did Not Make Us Fine Enough': The Discourses of Luxury - The Fundamental Contradiction of Sumptuary Regulation -Recognizability: 'The Mingle Mangle of Apparel' - Style Wars: Fashion and the Class Struggle Before Classes - Governing the City: Regulation, State Formation and the Coming of Modernity -Gender Wars: Sex, Power and Resistance - Misogyny and the Political Economy of Marriage: 'The Detestable Wickedness of Women' - Moral Regulation and Popular Culture - Mapping a Sumptuary Tradition: The English Experience - Enforcing Sumptory Law - Death or Transformation? The Fate of the Sumptuary Impulse - Sumptuary Law, Regulation and Governance - Appendix: English Sumptuary Statutes - Bibliographical References - Index