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“Fashions of Worldly Dames”: Separatist Discourses of Dress in Early Modern London, Amsterdam, and Plymouth Colony1
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
In a separatist congregation in London in 1594 a storm was brewing. The church's pastor, Francis Johnson, imprisoned for his noncon-formist activities, had recently married, and Francis's younger brother George, also incarcerated, was deeply troubled about his new sister-in-law Thomasine. George Johnson feared Francis was “blinded, bewitched, and besotted with the slie [sly] heights of the subtile proud woman,” and he considered it his duty as a good Christian and concerned brother to help “reforme” the situation. George's central grievance against Thomasine, a young widow before her marriage to Francis, was her excessive pride—she was “much noted” for it, he observed, which “became not a Pastor's wife, specially he being under persecution: in Prison: and often looking for death.” For George, as for other nonconforming Protestants who believed that one's outward behavior revealed one's inward moral state, his sister-in-law's pride was so offensive because it was so publicly and extravagantly displayed upon her body, in velvet, lace, whalebone, and gold. George wanted to “shew” Thomasine “that proud apparel and fashions of worldly dames were not decent in a Pastor[']s wife: that the creatures [material things], though lawful to be used, yet [are] not to be abused.”
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References
2. [Johnson, George], A Discourse of Some Troubles and Excommunications in the Banished English Church at Amsterdam (Amsterdam: n.p., 1603), 65, 94, 95.Google Scholar
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5. It is difficult to determine precisely what George meant here in his description of Thomasine's “codpiece breast”—whether he referred to her stomacher or her actual breasts. Late-sixteenth-century female fashion tended to deemphasize the bust, which was “pressed flat inside an unyielding, elongated tube [stomacher and bodice],” but it was also “often exposed by a low-cut neckline” and “pushed up.” Fashionable women whitened the exposed portions of the breasts with cosmetics. Hollander, Anne, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975/1993), 100, 98Google Scholar; Vincent, Susan, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ribeiro, Aileen, Dress and Morality (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986), 73.Google Scholar
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7. Trunkhose were the same as “round hose” (see n. 8). The (possibly vulgar) origins of the term “trunkhose” are unclear, Oxford English Dictionary. If “trunk sleeves” is the term George was too ashamed to name, perhaps it was because, as for “codpiece breasts,” it was a term borrowed from male fashion.
8. Round hose referred to men's trunkhose, or breeches, which extended from waist to upper thighs and were padded to produce a very full, “round” silhouette at the hips. While coarse cloth aprons were worn by men and women of the laboring classes as an essential part of their work dress, upper-class women began to wear decorative versions of working-class aprons over their outer skirts in the late 1500s. Ashelford, Jane, A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century (London: B. T. Batsford, 1983/1986), 142–44.Google Scholar
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16. Ibid., 128–29, 131, 136–37.
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