By the year 1000 the Andalusian caliphate constituted a highly urbanized society, where the largest cities in Europe were located, while the economy of the Christian kingdoms of Iberia was characterized by a low level of urbanization and a poor market development. Five hundred years later, the territory of al-Andalus had disappeared and its economy had been absorbed and transformed into the Christian kingdoms. The latter’s territorial expansion was marked by the growth of cities, the impact of trade on the agrarian economy and an increase in rural stratification that, at different levels, made the market important for the satisfaction of needs and peasant consumption. In the Christian kingdoms, a strong increase in noble spending, emulated by urban elites, dedicated to the conspicuous consumption of products partially purchased on the international market, occurred throughout the period. After the Black Death, with the consolidation of a rural elite, important sectors of the population were attracted by the lifestyle of the urban elites. This evolution can also be detectable in the lifestyle of vast sectors of the population, in the cities as well as in the rural areas.

The conclusion reviews the period and themes covered in the book. Different kinds of time played out in different sectors. Clothing reflects this temporal and spatial diversity. Viewed from the perspective of what people wore, however, this was the time of the Mao suit, or at least of the zhifu. Not everyone wore one; there were periods of light and shade in the intensity of dress conformity; there were differences between town and country, between male and female, even between decades. Throughout this period, however, zhifu had hegemonic status. In 1983, even as the Western suit was surging back into fashion, the Zhongshan suit was promoted as the ‘representative garment’ of men’s clothing in China, a garment that encapsulated national feeling, expressed the style of the Chinese people, and was also admired and loved by them.

Similarities in the imagery of Etruscan and Western Anatolian dress fashions, such as pointed shoes and Ionic chitons, indicate an obvious connection between the clothing systems of the two cultures. Indeed, Larissa Bonfante (2003) in her groundbreaking book Etruscan Dress classifies an “Ionian Phase” (550–475 BCE) in the development of the Etruscan clothing system. This chapter investigates the adaptation of Ionian dress items into the Etruscan dress repertoire through a comparative iconographic study of dress fashions in western Anatolia and Etruscan funerary art of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. After an overview of prevailing dress fashions in both cultures, it explores the specific case of shoes with upturned toes (Etruscan/Hittite shoes, as they are commonly known) to show the changing meanings and cultural connections the adopted dress items conveyed.

When we think of Tolstoy we picture a man who looks as far from a typical Russian nobleman as possible: bearded and wearing peasant-style clothes. This chapter examines the clothing choices Tolstoy made throughout his life and sets them in the contexts of imperial dress codes and his own thinking about Christianity and his place in the world. After Peter the Great introduced European dress for the nobility in the early eighteenth century, a large cultural divide developed between peasants and nobles. Tolstoy grew up wearing the clothing of the European elite while the peasants on his family estate wore more traditional Russian dress. However, in the 1860s Tolstoy began to wear a peasant-style beard and long, loose shirts, albeit made from more luxurious materials than were worn by the peasants themselves. Then, in the 1880s he began to make his own leather boots. This was all part of his broader philosophical project and attempt to lead a simpler, more Christian life. Though Tolstoy’s lifestyle choices often made things more difficult for his family, he nonetheless inspired many followers who imitated his dress style.

Unlike many other monarchical courts in history, the Roman imperial court had no distinctive form of dress for courtiers. But dress, jewellery, and the presentation of the body were still important in the world of the court. The clothed, adorned, and groomed body was a crucial instrument of communication within court society. In the case of the emperor and his family especially, the clothed body and its presentation also communicated with the rest of society; the considerable inscriptional evidence for staff in the imperial household with tasks involving clothing, jewellery, or grooming hints at the message of magnificence often being conveyed. Magnificence was, however, a two-edged sword. The ancient literary sources display clear traces of moralizing discourses that sought to pressure the emperor into what were considered to be appropriate sartorial decisions.

This chapter digs into the stuff of the city, examining the range of objects excavated from homes, garbage pits, moats, and even toilets to try to imagine the rhythms and character of daily life for the residents of Ichijōdani.

The Conradian fauna range from the albatross to the yearling and contain more than 150 different species of nonhuman animal. Despite the biodiversity, it is easy to overlook Conrad’s animals because they most frequently appear in metaphors and similes: at first sight, they lack agency, physical presence and independent meaning. But contrary to an articulated evaluative ideal of animal studies, Conrad’s animal metaphors invite reflection on human–animal relations, and demonstrate that an author can write attentively, sympathetically and thoughtfully on animals, despite primarily mentioning them in metaphors. The unreality effect, which I argue unites Conrad’s unconventional animal metaphors, confronts the reader to question the reality of the fictional construct. The unconventional sayings that produce this unreality effect all say: we have the appearance of a marginal, incidental detail but we are one of the most complicated structures in the text.

In both his writings and appearance, Richard Wright was acutely attuned to the power of dress to convey meaning and build identity. From his early stories collected in Uncle Tom’s Children, where the clothed and naked bodies of young Southern Black men signify poverty, innocence and, to whites, danger, through his late novel, Savage Holiday, where the naked body of a white man precipitates chaos and disaster, Wright’s attention to clothing and to the naked and nude bodies of Black and white men and women—including his meticulous self-presentation as an expatriate writer in Paris—allowed him to explore how attire and style produced sensations of self. The rituals of dressing (Lawd Today), the temptations of naked skin revealed beneath robes and coats (Native Son, The Outsider), the forms of nudity (“Big Boy Leaves Home,” Savage Holiday), the class dimensions of clothing (Black Boy) serve to display psychological and sociological forces of race, gender, sexuality, and power.

This chapter examines debates about manners and civility in the first half of the twentieth century. Tensions between aristocrats and Western-educated civil and military government officials culminated in the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932. This period saw an outpouring of works about politeness and manners targeting the bureaucratic elite and the emerging middle class. Thai statesmen devoted a remarkable amount of attention to what they perceived to be the problem of manners and morals. Leading political figures on all sides of politics wrote about the subject. The model of ideal conduct that the absolute monarchy had developed for bureaucrats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a hybrid between the palace courtier and the English gentleman, began to be challenged by new and more diverse conceptualizations of social relations, pushed by supporters of a more progressive political order. Yet the new rules for how to behave were resisted by supporters of the old aristocratic order. Some of them attempted to salvage what was left of the old courtly ways in books and novels and their own etiquette manuals.

This chapter introduces the main tenet of the book: that tensions over public expressions of Islam in Egypt have a 130-year history, as they stem from decisions made in the half-century surrounding the turn of the twentieth century (1871–1922), and they first erupted into conflict during a ‘culture war’ that shaped the intellectual discourse of Egypt’s constitutional period (1923–52). Dar al-ʿUlum and its graduates, the darʿamiyya, are crucial to understanding this culture war. After providing historical background, this chapter explains a new approach to modernisation, nation-building, and sociocultural change. It presents modernity as a constellation of projects advanced by Egypt’s ruling Khedives, Europeans, and a range of Egyptian-based social groups. It uses the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu, Frederik Barth, and Mikhail Bakhtin to connect educational experiences with sociocultural outcomes using capital and habitus, to explore how sociocultural boundaries are crossed in productive ways, and to widen definitions of hybridity beyond combinations that are shockingly jarring. It uses these ideas to explore the sociocultural position of the darʿamiyya, a group that was suspended in between the modernising alumni of civil schools (efendiyya) and the traditionally trained alumni of religious schools (shaykhs) until a 1926 student strike.

Chapter 6 argues that evolutionary theories of crypsis and display served as models for thinking through the positions of disempowered, marginalised groups at the turn of the century. Israel Zangwill sometimes invoked protective mimicry to decry Jewish assimilation as the degenerate defence mechanism of helpless dependents. Persecution, he complained, had driven Jews to become invisible and, thus, alienated from their own nature. Conversely, Charlotte Perkins Gilman made sense of women’s perceived weakness via the conspicuous display of sexual selection. Gilman argued that women’s eye-catching, impractical clothes reflected their feeble dependence on men. Through their rhetoric of standing out and blending in, both authors sought to recover the imagined authentic essences of their group identities, which regimes of Gentile or male surveillance had repressed. Yet they also imagined this self-realisation being asserted through visual display. The intersubjectivity of display rendered it inherently inauthentic, mediated by arbitrary symbols. This contradiction caused Zangwill’s vision of Jewish self-realisation to vacillate between essentialism and anti-essentialism, between a return to pure origins and progression toward open-ended, heterogeneous identity. Gilman’s vision similarly vacillated between the restoration of a primordial female ‘modesty’ and the progressive transcendence of visible sex distinctions.

This chapter looks at the visual and material culture of Jacobitism focusing on a heterogeneous group of objects in the collections of the NMS, V&A and BM, that are defiantly Jacobite in their content and intent. These objects range across media, and across the artistic hierarchies of the so–called fine and decorative arts. There are one–off larger than life portraits of the Jacobite figure heads and their families painted by court artists in the cosmopolitan urban centres of Europe, which were then mass-produced as engravings and published as prints; objects with a distinctive cultural currency, like coins and medals, engraved glassware and embroidered textiles. There are items of dress and adornment, including fans, garters and snuffboxes, that formed part of a corporeal culture of display and concealment. Some of the objects are gendered; others are anamorphic and shape-shifting. Many objects carry inscribed textual mottoes, sometimes in Latin that quote directly from texts including Vergil’s Aeneid. Using the body as a synthesising thematic, the chapter aims to chart the associations of Jacobitism with Scotland though the use of cross–media images and objects, while at the same time, highlighting the possibilities of using such material as tools for historical enquiry.