HIST 358: The Remarkable Body of Marie Antoinette (HC)

Dress is the most fleeting of the arts, subject to the arbitrary dictates of fashion. It is also, however, the art that relates most closely to our lives, both as a reflection of our self-image and, in the words of Louis XIV, as 'the mirror of history'. This handsome book examines English and French fashion from 1750 to 1820 by studying the art of the period, and it shows how changes in dress reflected social, political and cultural developments in the two countries. Closely analysing a wide range of visual sources - including portraits and history painting, sculpture, drawings, caricatures and fashion plates, by such artists as Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, David and Ingres - Aileen Ribeiro describes the development of fashion during this period.

Outram takes the body as the central focus of her book and the way that people perceived and constructed the world of experience in which they lived at a time of profound upheaval. Her choice of the body may at first seem unusual and not at all the way that histories are written. This is her central point. For although the body proves to be an enduring social referent, powerfully, provocatively persistent in contemporary society, it has, she argues, become trivialised. In this sense it has been lost to the crowds of modern politics and is deprived of the public authority it once possessed.

This is a history of the French Revolution told through the study of images of the body as they appeared in the popular literature of the time, showing how these images were at the very center of the metaphoric language used to describe the revolution in progress. The author draws upon some 2,000 texts, pamphlets, announcements, opinions, accounts, treatises, and journals to exhume the textual reality of the Revolution, the body of its history. The deployment of bodily images - the degeneracy of the nobility, the impotence of the king, the herculean strength of the citizenry, the goddess of politics appearing naked like Truth, the bleeding wounds of the Republican martyrs - allowed political society to represent itself at a pivotal moment in its history.

Until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colourful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Riello explores this earlier globalised economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialisation of Europe. This book ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe.

In Old Regime France credit was both a central part of economic exchange and a crucial concept for explaining dynamics of influence and power in all spheres of life. Crowston explores the role of fashionable appearances and sexual desire in leveraging credit and reconstructs women's vigorous participation in its gray markets. The scandalous relationship between Queen Marie Antoinette and fashion merchant Rose Bertin epitomizes the vertical loyalties and deep social divides of the credit regime and its increasingly urgent political stakes.

This book is a study of dress in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. Roche uses a large sample of inventories to explore the differences between social classes. This was an age of sumptuous fashion gravures and of a new press for ladies of leisure which provided their readers with a stimulating mixture of fashion and public affairs. There was a new concern for respectability as well as a desire to impress.

Richly illustrated with 100 images and drawing on pictorial, textual and object sources, this book presents essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, and visual and literary representations to illustrate the diversity and cultural significance of dress and fashion in the period.

There was no time in history when the politics of fashion was more fraught than during the French Revolution. In the 1790s almost any article of clothing could be scrutinized for evidence of one's political affiliation. Elizabeth Amann shows that in France, England, and Spain, daring dress became a way of taking a stance toward the social and political upheaval of the period. France is the centerpiece of the story, not just because of the significance of the Revolution but also because of the speed with which its politics and fashions shifted. Dandyism in France represented an attempt to recover a political center after the extremism of the Terror, while in England and Spain it offered a way to reflect upon the turmoil across the Channel and Pyrenees.

In the archives, da Vinha discovered a unique document: the description of the wardrobe of Marie-Antoinette in 1771, which appeared in the inventory after the death of her lady-in-waiting. 'Dress embellished with silver gauze and tassels, rose-colored taffeta petticoat, yellow sulfur big yellow coat' ... This inventory of several hundred missing garments follows the Dauphine as she arrives in France, discovers her household, and establishes her place at court."

Luxurious textiles, exacting tailoring, and lush trimmings abound in this glorious volume that celebrates the evolution of European dress through two centuries.

How did fashion work in Europe before modern media? This book explores the ways in which men, women, state industries, guilds and entrepreneurs in early modern Europe created, innovated and promoted new textiles, novel products and unusual forms of dress. Challenging conventional explanations that explain fashion as spreading from the court elite downwards, it demonstrates the complexity of the relationships that made fashions successful.

In Market à la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that The Tatler and The Spectator, two eighteenth-century British lifestyle magazines, played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which they operated, focusing on the processes of commodification, fetishization, and revisions of gender identity. Mackie's study makes clear that fashion publications, far from being commentaries on passing trends, assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities as well as in the development of commerce as recreation.

This book charts the history of muslin from India to Europe to America, illustrated by some of the finest examples from the V&A's relatively unexplored collection of more than 900 objects, including men's and women's dress, dolls, and ballet costumes. Muslin has been used for everything from gowns for Mughal princes and delicate dresses to the humble baby's diaper.

"In the turbulent political and social landscape of Revolutionary France, dress played a major role in defining and displaying new identities. What people wore was, in fact, a vital symbol of their allegiances and beliefs. Drawing on a wide range of documentary and visual sources, this book offers a vivid picture of the highly charged politics of Revolutionary appearances. The author explores the dynamic complexity of the new socio-political world, where the identification of who stood for what was such an urgent, if vexed, issue: where identical items of dress could stand for opposing political ideologies, where a variety of institutions - from local societies to the national assembly - tried to define the meanings associated with clothing, and where the clothes a person wore could seal their fate. Tracing the stories surrounding the liberty cap, the different manifestations of official dress, the tricolore cockade and the sans-culotte provides a new and exciting insight into the complexities and uncertainties that made up life in Revolutionary France and the political culture that it created."--BOOK JACKET.

This book challenges widely held assumptions about both the genre of portraiture and the political and cultural role of images. After 1789, portraiture came to dominate French visual culture because it addressed the central challenge of the Revolution: how to turn subjects into citizens. Portraits allowed sitters and artists to appropriate the means of representation, both aesthetic and political, and articulate new forms of selfhood and citizenship, often in astonishingly creative ways. The triumph of revolutionary portraiture also marks a turning point in the history of art, when seriousness of purpose and aesthetic ambition passed from historical narratives to the depiction of contemporary individuals.

The term "macaroni" was once as familiar a label as "punk" or "hipster" is today. In this handsomely illustrated book devoted to notable 18th-century British male fashion, the author brings together dress, biography, and historical events with the broader visual and material culture of the late 18th century. For thirty years, macaroni was a highly topical word, yielding a complex set of social, sexual, and cultural associations.

In 1764, British Customs confiscated a book containing hundreds of silk samples of different qualities from French agents who were attempting to sell them illegally in London. The merchant's sample book acquired in 1972 by the V&A (and reproduced here in facsimile) may be this very book, a fascinating record of the eighteenth-century French and English silk industries and their commercial practices. The editor includes a detailed introduction to the history and economics involved.

The connection between fashion, femininity, frivolity and Frenchness has become a cliché. Yet, relegating fashion to the realm of frivolity and femininity is a distinctly modern belief that developed along with the urban culture of the Enlightenment. In eighteenth-century France, a commercial culture filled with shop girls, fashion magazines and window displays began to supplant a courtly fashion culture based on rank and distinction, stimulating debates over the proper relationshipsbetween women and commercial culture and between morality and taste. The story of how "la mode" was "sexed" as feminine offers compelling insights into the political, economic and cultural tensions that marked the birth of modern commercial culture.

This is a detailed study of the material lives of the middle classes in the pre-industrial era, a period which saw considerable growth in consumption. Breaking new ground in focusing on households and the use of probate inventories, Weatherill has provided a book which gives both a general account of the domestic environment of the period, and a scholarly analysis of the data on consumption patterns.

Tying together of several distinct cultural patterns during this century to create a culture of respectability and its impact on popular culture, trade, politics, social dynamics, and literature, this original and thoughtful work provides a comprehensive and much-needed understanding of the origins of modern consumption and all of its cultural implications.

"Under the direction of Professor John Brewer, the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies and the Clark Library at UCLA have created an ambitious international programme to analyse the material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through its patterns of consumption. Focus on this period allows consideration of a world in which economic and political connections are becoming global, in which an unprecedented range of goods and services are on offer, and in which the old political structures are first subverted and then radically modified.

As an inquiry into the consumption rather than the production of culture, this volume argues that culture does not become culture until it is consumed. Leading US and European specialists explore topics such as the formation of a culture-consuming public, the development of a literary canon, the role of consumption in the formation of the modern state, elite and popular forms of cultural consumption and the place of women as consumers of culture.

Louis Mandrin led a gang of bandits who brazenly smuggled contraband into eighteenth-century France. Kwass brings new life to the legend of this Gallic Robin Hood and the thriving underworld he helped to create. Contraband exposes the dark side of the early phase of globalization, revealing hidden connections between illicit commerce, criminality, and popular revolt. As French subjects began to crave colonial products, Louis XIV lined the royal coffers by imposing a state monopoly on tobacco from America and an embargo on brilliantly colored calico cloth from India. Vigorous black markets arose through which traffickers fed these exotic goods to eager French consumers. Amid cycles of underground rebellion and agonizing penal repression, the memory of Mandrin inspired ordinary subjects and Enlightenment philosophers alike to challenge royal power and forge a movement for radical political change.

This volume traces the output and dissemination of books and how reading tastes changed in the years 1769-1794. Mapping the book trade of the Société typographique de Neuchâtel (STN), a Swiss publisher-wholesaler which operated throughout Europe, the authors reconstruct the cosmopolitan elite culture of the later enlightenment, incorporating many engaging case studies.. By means of comparative study, the author considers the entire book market across Europe, making local, regional and chronological nuances, based on advanced taxonomies of subject content, author information, markers of illegality and much more.

For over a hundred years (1714-1830) a King George sat on the British throne. It was a time of transformation, as cities grew, industry thrived, and trade expanded around the world. Travel became easier, encouraging the spread of fashions and ideas. An explosion in print culture also brought new horizons, as an increasingly literate society devoured newspapers, satirical pamphlets, magazines, and the newly emerging novel form. Georgians Revealed explores daily life through a variety of objects, tracing the Georgians' famous love of shopping and celebrity, gambling and domestic design, and rules that governed behavior.

Explores the rise of key commodities across the globe, and charts how cosmopolitan consumption emerged as the most distinctive feature of material life after 1500. Goods heightened comfort, redefined leisure and widened access to fashion. See in particular the chapters on needlework arts, fabrics and furs, and cosmopolitan dress. Also available in print.

In Market à la Mode, Erin Mackie examines the role that The Tatler and The Spectator, two eighteenth-century British lifestyle magazines, played in the growth of fashion and how they influenced their readers. She traces the commercial context in which they operated, focusing on the processes of commodification, fetishization, and revisions of gender identity. Mackie's study makes clear that fashion publications, far from being commentaries on passing trends, assumed a leading role in defining women's legitimate sphere of activities as well as in the development of commerce as recreation.

In this book the 18th century Enlightenment receives an important reassessment, using an astonishing range of materials and objects drawn from Europe and beyond, including artifacts from India and China, West Africa and Polynesia. A series of authoritative essays explores the full range of material culture in the long 18th century, raising crucial questions about notions of property and invention, homely and commercial lives. The book also includes a series of well-illustrated exhibits, a startling and provocative assemblage of objects from the Enlightenment world, each accompanied by expert commentaries.

"Combining the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, Paul Cheney explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France. Drawing upon the writings of diplomats, philosophes, consuls of commerce, and merchants, Cheney rewrites the history of political economy in the Enlightenment era and provides a new interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution."--BOOK JACKET.

Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France constructs the first cultural history of porcelain making in France. It takes its title from two types of bodies treated in this study: the craft of porcelain making shaped clods of earth into a clay body to produce high-end commodities and the French elite shaped human bodies into social subjects with the help of makeup, stylish patterns, and accessories. These practices crossed paths in the work of artisans, whose luxury objects reflected and also influenced the curves of fashion in the eighteenth century. Shapely Bodies reveals the politics behind the making of French porcelain’s image.

This exhibition catalog explores the introduction and use of tea, coffee, and chocolate in the 17th and 18th centuries. First appreciated for therapeutic reasons, the drinks became associated with a variety of practices across social groups, spurring the growth of consumption and the spread of a public culture.

Uses one of the most infamous examples of monetary innovation, the assignats--a currency initially defined by French revolutionaries as "circulating land"--to demonstrate that money is as much a social and political mediator as it is an economic instrument. Following the assignats from creation to abandonment, Spang shows them to be subject to the same slippages between policies and practice as other human inventions. Spang's book is also a new history of the French Revolution, one in which radicalization was driven by an ever-widening gap between political ideals and the realities of daily life. Money played a critical role in creating this gulf.