Mantua of the Month – May 2020

This mantua and petticoat dates from the 1760s. It is shaped from French silk, and features an undulating ermine motif. The design mimics the ermine fur trim, which is often seen in royal portraiture. Ermine have a white winter coat apart from their tails, which retain a dark hue. Real fur ermine tails are interspersed

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

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

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