By also attending to the wealth of literary material of the period, imaginative and nonfiction texts alike, Ribeiro provides a more complete sense of the extent to which subjectivity in Stuart England was negotiated through attire. The form of her book, however, belies what makes it a fresh and important contribution to early modern studies at large: Ribeiro also takes textual representations seriously as sources for understanding a "narrative of dress" (5). The book includes scores of sumptuous color reproductions in a gorgeous, oversize format. Ribeiro is a renowned art historian at the Courtland Institute of Art and she carefully analyzes seventeenth century imagery. Ribeiro's turn, then, to visual representations of the clothing of the period is a necessary one and it is clear why she would look to the wealth of visual depictions of dress, mostly portraiture of royalty and aristocrats, to give a sense of how fashions emerge, develop, and shift throughout this tumultuous period. That this list is so brief indicates the challenges faced by the early modern fashion historian. Review by ROZE HENTSCHELL, COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY.Įarly in the introductory chapter to Aileen Ribeiro's Fashion and Fiction, an ambitious survey of seventeenth century English dress, the author describes several surviving garments from the period. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005. Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England.
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