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Your Humble Handmaid: Elizabethan Gifts of Needlework*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Lisa M. Klein
Lisa M. Klein*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Extract

The Stowe inventory of the contents of the Wardrobe of Robes gives us a privileged glimpse into the closets of Queen Elizabeth in 1600. There could be found over one thousand clothing items: gowns, robes, kirtles, foreparts, petticoats, cloaks, safeguards, and doublets, plus two hundred additional pieces of material, as well as pantofles, fans, and jewelry. Many of these were gifts presented to the queen at the New Year, on progresses, at Accession Day tilts or other events. Items of embroidered clothing come to dominate the existing gift rolls. The 1588-89 New Year's gifts include, in addition to £795 in gold, almost six dozen gifts of clothing, most of them richly embroidered, plus sixteen items of jewelry, several pieces of gold- or silverplate, and a dozen gifts of embroidered furnishings.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , Summer 1997 , pp. 459 - 493
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1997

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Footnotes

*

The research for this article was undertaken with the assistance of an Ohio State University Seed Grant. I wish to thank the staff of the British Library and the Bodleian Library for their gracious assistance, Robert Reed, my resident anthropologist, and an unknown reader for Renaissance Quarterly.

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