Globalization and the Work of Fashion in Early Modern German Letters

As historians of the material cultures of Italy, England, India, China, and the Americas continue to reconstruct the early modern overseas trade in fashionable commodities, economic historians increasingly urge the study of early modern (or first-wave) globalism. Drawing on insights from this vast body of work, this essay explores the German Alamode discourse of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Long a stepchild of national literatures, the Alamode discourse across European vernaculars offers a locus of remarkable critical potential, serving to illustrate how global energies shaped local, even apparently provincial, discussions. Via readings of widely circulated and translated illustrated broadsheets, satirical pamphlets, prosodies, and poetry (by Balde, Zesen, Lauremberg, and Logau), this essay also examines the strategies early modern German literati developed to tame the anxieties unleashed when the world arrived at home. Globalization was imagined to work foremost on women, and the backlash it engendered sought to refashion women’s “hard heads,” hammering out “fashionable” notions such as women’s intellectual and literary abilities.