Undressing Rubens

The essays collected in this volume meet at a point of convergence between costume, art, and history, and focus on the seventeenth-century Southern Netherlands. Undressing Rubens looks at the significance of costume in life and art in the age of Rubens, confirming that, as is increasingly recognised by scholars of many aspects of early modern European culture, this is hardly an insular topic. Cloth and clothing in seventeenth-century Flemish paintings lead the contributing scholars north of the border to the United Provinces, south to courts in Florence, Mantua, Madrid and elsewhere, and east to Cologne and, ultimately, to Japan. Stretching back several centuries to provide critical context and points of origin for many seventeenth-century practices and ideas, the innovative research presented here also points forward in time, dealing with implications in later centuries but also, in many cases, engaging directly with questions of historiography still quite relevant today.