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13 - Clothing Dependents: Dress of Children and Servants in the Petre Household, 1586–1587
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- By Drea R. Leed
- Edited by Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Maren Clegg Hyer
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- Book:
- Refashioning Medieval and Early Modern Dress
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 12 June 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 November 2019, pp 255-280
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Summary
Household accounts have a quotidian fascination all their own. On the surface these dry and impersonal records of moneys in and moneys out seem to contain little personality; but look deeper, and they illuminate humdrum details of life that would otherwise have been lost centuries ago. You may come across an entry “For my nephew Fraunces … for a pounde of sugere plate and greate comfettes to make hym larne his booke,” and envision a schoolboy sulking in his chair, gazing out the window and daydreaming of doing anything but Latin while his mother coaxes him with candies to mind his tutor. Young Richard Farmor was given “suger-candie to avoyde fleme, his mouthe and throte being sore,” evoking the image of an unhappy, feverish child being soothed by a nurse; and reading about funds “gyven to my cosyn Margett to putt in her purse at her going to My Ladye Elisabethes grace” lets one imagine the excitement of young Margaret, feeling terribly grown-up, her parents exhorting her to pay servants well on her first visit to Princess Elizabeth.
The Petre household accounts are one of several such collections surviving from the Tudor era. Ranging from the 1540s to the beginning of the seventeenth century, these accounts record outlays for food, drink, clothing, entertainment, construction, liveries and wages, household maintenance, and much more. Each book dates from Michaelmas (29 September) of one year to Michaelmas of the next. Although they are not a continuous series, their valuable yearly windows into the life of a Tudor household have seen them used as sources in several books on Tudor entertainment, music, feasting, and politics. They are also quite useful for the student of historical costume, as evidenced by Anne Buck’s examination of the clothing of Thomasine Petre, daughter of William Petre, listed in the Petre accounts of the 1550s.
The present article focuses on a later generation of the Petre family: that of John Petre, born in 1549 to William and his second wife, Anne Tyrrell, and John's children. John Petre married Mary Waldegrave, daughter of Sir Edward Walgrave of Borley, in 1570. They had three surviving sons: William, John, and Thomas. They also had two children who died in infancy: Edward, who lived for five months, and Anne, who lived for 16 months.
6 - 'Ye Shall Have It Cleane”: Textile Cleaning Techniques in Renaissance Europe
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- By Drea Leed, costume historian focusing on the clothing and textile trades of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.
- Edited by Robin Netherton, Gale R. Owen-Crocker
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- Book:
- Medieval Clothing and Textiles 2
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 14 February 2019
- Print publication:
- 20 April 2006, pp 101-120
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Summary
“The first part [of this tract] deals with the clothing of people in holy orders, which are vestment and gown and alb and surplice, and how many ells of fabric one requires for them and how one refreshes the color of velvet and silk and wool fabrics which have lost their color. The second part speaks of painting silver and gold and of all colors, and of how one draws pictures upon paper, and what is required for this.”
Thus opens the text of the manuscript known as the Nuremberg Kunstbuch, written as an instructional manual for the sisters of the convent of St. Catherine's in Nuremburg, Germany. The manuscript, consisting of sixty-nine parchment folios in Gothic halfcursive, was bound into book form in the last half of the fifteenth century. It was apparently in the possession of lay sister Margaret Bindterin in 1596, the year St. Catherine's was dissolved by order of the Nuremberg council. When she died in the following year, the Kunstbuch was handed over to the Nuremberg Stadtbibliothek, which had earlier received the other manuscripts that had belonged to the convent.
The manuscript is a wide-ranging document designed to help the nuns in the course of their daily work of making the rich liturgical vestments worn by Dominican priests, cleaning a variety of fine textiles, and painting and gilding both manuscripts and cloth. The convent's scriptorium was quite active during the last half of the fifteenth century, and it is very possible that this treatise was copied in its entirety from one or more of the books brought to the convent by the daughters of well-to-do townsfolk, or from copies of older manuscripts already in its library.
THE KUNSTBUCH's FABRIC CARE RECIPES
The Kunstbuch contains a total of twelve recipes for cleaning undergarments, removing spots, and restoring the color of faded garments. Table 6.1 presents the original texts of these recipes, with translations. Although small in number, these recipes offer a glimpse into the particular issues that the sisters may have faced in repairing and cleaning their store of garments.
Although not a topic commonly addressed in the great philosophical treatises of the time, the care of fabric and textiles was a ubiquitous concern during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.