Biography

Ulinka Rublack is Professor of Early Modern History at Cambridge University and Fellow of St John´s College. Her recent books include The Astronomer & the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight For His Mother (Oxford University Press: 2015), and Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford University Press: 2010). She has edited Holbein´s Dance of Death for the Penguin Classics Series and co-edited The First Book of Fashion: The Book of Clothes of Matthäus and Veit Konrad Schwarz for Bloomsbury (2015). Her monograph Dürer´s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Rublack´s books are translated into six languages and her book on Johannes and Katharina Kepler inspired a novel, a film and a new monument for Katharina. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and was awarded the German Historikerpreis in 2019.

Project Summary

The Renaissance created our modern, restlessly accumulating selves. Yet fashion has not been made central to this story, despite the fact that everyone knows that velvets were far more expensive than paintings we now admire in museums. What has fashion meant in history, how has it shaped societies and the way in which people sought to express themselves? Herein lies one of the most intriguing historical problems and fields of forces, ripe for unpacking in terms of that “complex parallelogram” the late Chris Bayly set out against reductive materialism. Accelerated forces of economic and technological development – urban, rural and global -, state formation, urbanisation, artistic, religious and social change interlinked with new types of knowledge and information, new sensibilities, ideas and powerful stories that began to be told about what made a society. Ulinka Rublack´s geographical focus is European as well as global and comparative, and during her time at the I Tatti she particularly focuses on the Italian Renaissance in a global context. Her project identifies multicentric changes, continuities, interconnections and disconnections and their distinctive features in different locales. Fashion was certainly no European invention – global influences frequently created European fashion and drove change. We can analyse the distinctive factors which shaped its force in different societies. In many respects, global influences created European fashion. Rublack conducts this analysis by scrutinising politics, the economy, social change, ideas as well as bodily practices and do so by drawing on a wide range of sources – visual, archival, literary, secondary sources and artefacts themselves.