Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (review)

A decade in the making, running close to three hundred small-font, large-format pages, and containing fifty-eight illustrations of cultural artifacts gathered from some twenty-five American and European libraries, museums, and private collections, this book is, materially speaking, made of substantial "stuff" indeed. Yet the book's most significant departure from previous scholarship resides not solely in its stuff but in its style or methodology. Its formal innovation mirrors the matter of which it speaks—Renaissance clothing. Since most readers will not know a great deal beforehand about this topic, however, one must read the book in order to learn how to read the book. What one discovers in doing so is that its method of argumentation resembles the making of sumptuous Renaissance garments—collaborative works, "assemblages of parts" (22) made up of opulent materials stitched and then restitched together in inventive ways. Jones and Stallybrass likewise assemble an extraordinary range of materials (literary texts, theatrical documents, paintings, prints, ephemera, apparel, armor, jewelry, textiles, and samplers) that are laced together into a series of interwoven polemics. Some readers may miss a single overarching argument; but few will be able to resist the pleasure of a text so richly embroidered with local color.

"[W]e have attempted," Jones and Stallybrass state in their conclusion, "to understand two conflicting aspects of clothes: clothes as material memories, constitutive of the subject; clothes as a currency whose circulation unmakes and remakes the subject" (269). These two conflicting aspects correspond to two discrete historicist methodologies. The first focuses on clothes as repositories of memory bearing "quite literally the trace and the memory of [their] owner[s]" (201). The longevity of clothes distinguishes how clothing functioned in the early modern period from the way it operates in the present. This distinction is rendered rhetorically as an epistemic break that can scarcely be comprehended. Historiography here defines itself as estrangement, a recovery of difference. The Renaissance becomes a Wunderkammer of strange things and curious customs: we learn, for example, that a scarlet dye called "kermes" was made of"various species of cocci, an insect found on oaks" (44), and that because "only the female insects could be used, just before they laid their eggs in May and June" (44-45), the dye was exorbitantly expensive, leading to its replacement by one made from the Mexican cochineal. Kermes stands nostalgically for a lost world in which things were "richly absorbent" not only of exotic and extravagant dyes but of "symbolic meaning, . . . memories and social relations" (8). The authors acknowledge that they may "appear 'fetishistic'" (7). Yet they distinguish their own fetishism of "the 'objectness' of the object" from fetishism of the commodity, which "comes to life through the death of the object" (8). Modern materialism, in fetishizing forgetful commodities, has failed to remember mere things, or to recognize the way in which things themselves remember.

A second mode of analysis is concerned with how the "material mnemonics" of clothing "increasingly confronted the marketplace of circulating fashions" (21). Insofar as this strain situates the circulation of clothing in relation to nascent capitalist modes of production, it tends to emphasize historical continuities rather than discontinuities, foregrounding gradual shifts in the forms of labor necessary to produce textiles and apparel. Here again, methodology mirrors subject matter: the making and remaking, circulation and recirculation of clothing are traced through intertextual analyses of the making and remaking, circulation and recirculation of literary and visual topoi. The book thusdevelops a hybrid methodology that is well suited to its hybrid subject: "clothes as mnemonics and clothes as cash" (32).

In Part One, "Material subjects," subjectivity is conceived as "composed through textile and jewels, fashioned by clothes" (35) and is analyzed in relation to the symbolic and economic value of clothing. Chapter 1, "The currency of clothing," argues that "before the advent of the modern...