The Typical Tudor: Reconstructing Everyday 16th Century Dress

Abstract

In their book The Typical Tudor: Reconstructing Everyday 16th Century Dress, Jane Malcolm-Davies and Ninya Mikhaila make an argument for how workingand middle-class people dressed during the Tudor era in England. They support it with a variety of evidence: wills, legal documents, archeological finds, portraits, extant garments, and many other sources. This book is a follow-up and elaboration upon The Tudor Tailor: Reconstructing Sixteenth-Century Dress (2006). It starts with an introduction that explains the groups of people the authors consider “typical,” which defines the scope of the book. Malcolm-Davies and Mikhaila offer visual and written evidence in support of their stance and, using this as a starting point, begin the book by describing how ordinary people purchased or otherwise acquired yardage and clothing. The next chapters are a detailed exploration of fabrics and colors used by “the typical Tudor.” Augmenting this chapter is a table with the names of colors and fabrics commonly used with supporting documentary evidence and descriptions of how each fabric was used in the construction of garments. It concludes with a page of pie charts detailing how color was used by the ordinary English person of the sixteenth century. The following chapter details construction techniques (hand stitches, fabric buttons, knitting and fulling instructions, methods for pleats, etc.) and includes detailed photographs of extant tools and garments from the sixteenth century, diagrams, and color photographs. Most of the rest of the book focuses on a variety of construction techniques for specific sixteenth-century garments and data about them. Possibly the most exciting of these sections describes in detail the cut, composition, and construction of a previously undiscovered