17th March: 'Dispossession in Lace: Jacobean Ruffs and Early English Colonialism'

17th March: 'Dispossession in Lace: Jacobean Ruffs and Early English Colonialism'
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This is a past event

Wed 17th March  

If you wish to attend this seminar please register here.

Dr Lauren Working (TIDE Project, Oxford):   

'Dispossession in Lace: Jacobean Ruffs and Early English Colonialism'  

 

Three thousand miles from London, amidst tobacco leaves and animal bones, archaeologists in Jamestown have unearthed five goffering irons – the tools used to shape the ruffs worn by the English ruling elite. This paper uses the material culture of ruffs, from fragments of lace to goffering irons, to investigate issues of power, civility, and labour in the early seventeenth-century Atlantic. Drawing on Anne Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass’ 'Renaissance clothing and the materials of memory', this paper concludes by considering how contemporary Indigenous writers and artists have evoked the ruff as a symbol of this first moment of colonial trauma. This presents a different perspective on the cultural memory of clothing, offering a case study into the geopolitics behind consumption and the way Indigenous voices might be better integrated into the history of colonialism. 

   

Lauren Working is researcher on the TIDE project at the University of Oxford. She freelances for the National Portrait Gallery and is currently working on several museum projects that use objects, from still life painting to Indigenous featherwork, to explore the entangled histories of colonialism and English heritage.  

 

If you require help please contact zuzanna.muszynska@abdn.ac.uk 

Speaker
Dr Lauren Working