Mantua of the Month – April 2020

Each month I will be doing a short feature on a gown that catches my fancy as part of the ‘Mantua of the Month’ feature on my blog page. For April 2020, I have chosen this Court Mantua, which was featured in an exhibition last year entitled ‘A Dress Fit for a King’ at the

Women’s History Month 2020 – on this day tweets

Following Women’s History Month 2020, I thought it would be useful to collate my ‘on this day’ tweets into one place with added references. There were significant breaks, particularly in the first part of the month, when I was observing the digital picket in support of the UCU strike. However, by the end of the

Mantua of the Month – March 2020

Mantua of the Month is a fun feature on my blog page, which draws attention to the material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first mantua to be featured (admittedly I am publishing this a little late!) is this Court dress, c. 1750 from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, also

Margaret Lendall (fl. 1660 – 1668)

Margaret Lendall was a Haberdashers’ Company apprentice milliner/lace-seller who worked on the Royal Exchange in 1660s London. In October 1660, orphaned siblings Margaret and Robert Lendall petitioned Charles II, asking him to ‘comisserate theire present suffering condition and to allow them a subsistence dureing theire minoritie’.[1] Their father, Captain Robert Lendall, had ‘endeavored to manifest his

Unbound Exhibition at Two Temple Place

* This review was written before Unbound was closed due to recent events. I have decided to publish it to celebrate the work that went into the exhibition. Two Temple Place is an imposing building, and it has the added advantages of being free to visit, with a great shop and cafe. Their exhibition Unbound:

Mary Marsden #HerBook

The Twitter hashtag #HerBook and blog Early Modern Female Book Ownership have revealed much about early modern women’s literacy, their reading habits and book ownership, and it seems particularly fitting to promote the growing scholarship on these aspects of women’s history on International Women’s Day. I was recently fortunate enough to find an eighteenth-century book

Welcome to A Fashionable Business – Launch for Women’s History Month

Women’s History Month 2020 has arrived and I am thrilled to launch my new blog: A Fashionable Business to celebrate the myriad contributions that women made to the social, economic, and cultural history of early modern London. My PhD project officially began at Birkbeck in Autumn 2016 but I first became interested in the history

Margaret Marsh (fl. 1723 – 1757)

Margaret Marsh was identified as a ‘Widow and Mantua Maker’ on ‘Saint Albans Street in the Parish of Saint James Westminster’ in her will. She bequeathed £1000 each to her three children, and £100 to her sister Ann Cheshire. To her brother Henry she gave £10 for mourning, plus she forgave ‘all Sums of Money

Mary Reynolds (fl. 1694 – 1720)

Mary Reynolds was a member of the Mercers’ Company, working as a milliner in the City of London in the early eighteenth century. She was the daughter of William Reynolds, a gentleman from Canterbury in Kent and was apprenticed to a widow named Susanna Bolt on 28 September 1694. After she was admitted free of

Mary Bassett (fl. 1693 – 1712)

Mary Bassett was a milliner and tenant of the upper floor or ‘pawn’ of the Royal Exchange at the turn of the eighteenth century. Figure 1 shows her name recorded in tax assessments as the tenant of ‘a Shopp’ in the ‘exchange above’ in 1693/4.[1] Figure 1 We can learn more about the array of

Susanna Kidley-Warren (1642 – 1684)

Susanna Kidley-Warren was a seamstress working on Cheapside in the City of London between 1655 and 1684. She was baptised in Little Birch in Herefordshire on 2 November 1642.[1] The daughter of John Kidley, a gentleman, and his wife Bridget, Susanna Kidley was bound to Edward Moodey, a milliner from St Martin’s Le Grand through