ABSTRACT
Until relatively recently the study of dress in the past confined itself to explorations of changing styles and material composition, and histories of production and consumption. Examination of clothing’s social and cultural meanings in historical context, and in particular their significance in the formation of embodied identities, emerged in the wake of sociological studies from the 1980s on, but are still relatively under-explored compared to other histories of the body and sexual identities. This chapter briefly examines the approaches to the subject taken by other scholars to date, and then turns to map some of the relationships between clothing and the body in early modernity: the importance of garments to good health, the intimate involvement of cloth and clothing in the experience of maturation and bodily transition, and the role of dress in the understanding and performance of gender. While the examples used here are primarily English, the map may equally be employed to navigate the conceptual terrain of other early modern societies in Europe, for while the specifics of fashion varied across borders, underlying dress practices and ways of conceptualizing the clothed – and unclothed – body reached over regional, political and religious divides.
