Sweet and Clean?: Bodies and Clothes in Early Modern England

356 Pages·2020·5.38 MB·English

by  Susan North

OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/02/20, SPi
Sweet and Clean?
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/02/20, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/02/20, SPi
Sweet and Clean?
Bodies and Clothes in Early
Modern England
SUSAN NORTH
1
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/02/20, SPi
1
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© Susan North 2020
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First Edition published in 2020
Impression: 1
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OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/02/20, SPi
To my mother, Scottie
And in memory of my father, Peter and stepmother, Dorothy
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/02/20, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/02/20, SPi
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Conventions, Measurements, and Abbreviations xi
List of Figures xiii
1. Digging the Dirt in the Pursuit of Cleanliness 1
I. ADVICE
2. Manners and Health 31
3. Clothing and Disease 53
4. Clean Bodies 83
II. PRACTICE
5. Wearing Linens 115
6. Owning Linens 143
7. Manufacturing Linens 162
8. Sewing Linens 178
9. Washing Linens 208
10. More Washing 230
11. Washing Bodies 258
12. Sweet and Clean 284
Appendix: List of surviving linens examined 295
Bibliography 299
Index 333
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/02/20, SPi
OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 11/02/20, SPi
Acknowledgements
Seven years and seven publishers on, I am enormously grateful to Oxford University
Press for recognizing this book as worthy of publication and particularly to my
editor Cathryn Steele for steering and shaping it into a publishable form. Many
thanks to Kabilan Selvakumar, who oversaw the production of it and to Kim
Allen for her thorough copy-editing. Thank you to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art and the Philadelphia Museum for free reproduction of paintings in their
collections. The Victoria and Albert Museum allowed free use of a significant
proportion of the images in this book. They and the Gallery of Costume at Platt
Hall in Manchester generously granted permission for me to use my own photo-
graphs of their objects.
The research on linens was done for a PhD at Queen Mary, University of
London completed in 2012. I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities
Research Council for the doctoral grant that made this possible, and to my super-
visors, Professor Evelyn Welch and Jenny Tiramani. I owe a great debt to the
anonymous reviewers of this manuscript and an earlier one; their insight and
helpful criticism contributed significantly to its arguments. All remaining errors
are entirely of my own making.
I owe a huge debt to a number of fellow curators who were incredibly generous
with their time, collections, storerooms, tea, and encouragement, allowing me to
study and take layouts of the linens in their museums: Miles Lambert at the
Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall, Elaine Uttley and Rosemary Harden at the
Museum of Fashion in Bath, Hilary Davidson and Beatrice Behlen at the Museum
of London, Pauline Rushton at Liverpool Museum, Althea MacKenzie at Hereford
Museum, Nicola Dyke and Ros Watson at the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate.
A special thank you to Kerry Taylor for making Lot 67 in her 26 June 2012 sale
available to me for study.
Other colleagues provided vital leads and information which proved crucial
to my research: Natasha Awais-Dean, Ian Dicker, Dr Alastair Durie, Judith
Hodgkinson, Sarah Medlam, and Philip Sykas—many thanks to them all. Lesley
Miller at the V&A has been hugely supportive of this endeavour starting with the
first AHRC application. I am very grateful to the British Library, the London
Library, the libraries at Queen Mary and Senate House, the National Library of
Scotland, and the Wellcome Library for access to their collections as well as the
help of their wonderful staff.
Heartfelt thanks to long-suffering friends and family who listened patiently to
long-winded, nonsensical monologues about insensible perspiration.