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“Fashions of Worldly Dames”: Separatist Discourses of Dress in Early Modern London, Amsterdam, and Plymouth Colony1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Martha L. Finch
Affiliation:
assistant professor of Religious Studies at Missouri State University.

Extract

In a separatist congregation in London in 1594 a storm was brewing. The church's pastor, Francis Johnson, imprisoned for his noncon-formist activities, had recently married, and Francis's younger brother George, also incarcerated, was deeply troubled about his new sister-in-law Thomasine. George Johnson feared Francis was “blinded, bewitched, and besotted with the slie [sly] heights of the subtile proud woman,” and he considered it his duty as a good Christian and concerned brother to help “reforme” the situation. George's central grievance against Thomasine, a young widow before her marriage to Francis, was her excessive pride—she was “much noted” for it, he observed, which “became not a Pastor's wife, specially he being under persecution: in Prison: and often looking for death.” For George, as for other nonconforming Protestants who believed that one's outward behavior revealed one's inward moral state, his sister-in-law's pride was so offensive because it was so publicly and extravagantly displayed upon her body, in velvet, lace, whalebone, and gold. George wanted to “shew” Thomasine “that proud apparel and fashions of worldly dames were not decent in a Pastor[']s wife: that the creatures [material things], though lawful to be used, yet [are] not to be abused.”

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2005

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References

2. [Johnson, George], A Discourse of Some Troubles and Excommunications in the Banished English Church at Amsterdam (Amsterdam: n.p., 1603), 65, 94, 95.Google Scholar

3. Ibid., 135–36.

4. n“Codpiece,” def. l.b., Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com. The OED recognizes the term “codpiece breast,” but I have been unable to find any costume historians who mention it.

5. It is difficult to determine precisely what George meant here in his description of Thomasine's “codpiece breast”—whether he referred to her stomacher or her actual breasts. Late-sixteenth-century female fashion tended to deemphasize the bust, which was “pressed flat inside an unyielding, elongated tube [stomacher and bodice],” but it was also “often exposed by a low-cut neckline” and “pushed up.” Fashionable women whitened the exposed portions of the breasts with cosmetics. Hollander, Anne, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975/1993), 100, 98Google Scholar; Vincent, Susan, Dressing the Elite: Clothes in Early Modern England (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ribeiro, Aileen, Dress and Morality (London: B. T. Batsford, 1986), 73.Google Scholar

6. Discourse, 137, 127.

7. Trunkhose were the same as “round hose” (see n. 8). The (possibly vulgar) origins of the term “trunkhose” are unclear, Oxford English Dictionary. If “trunk sleeves” is the term George was too ashamed to name, perhaps it was because, as for “codpiece breasts,” it was a term borrowed from male fashion.

8. Round hose referred to men's trunkhose, or breeches, which extended from waist to upper thighs and were padded to produce a very full, “round” silhouette at the hips. While coarse cloth aprons were worn by men and women of the laboring classes as an essential part of their work dress, upper-class women began to wear decorative versions of working-class aprons over their outer skirts in the late 1500s. Ashelford, Jane, A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century (London: B. T. Batsford, 1983/1986), 142–44.Google Scholar

9. The doublet was the outer garment covering the male torso, like a close-fitting, stiff, well-padded, waist-length jacket with detachable or permanently attached sleeves. It was attached at the waist to the “upper hose,” or breeches, with points; likewise, points sometimes attached the breeches to the “nether hose,” or stockings. Vincent, , Dressing the Elite, 1314.Google Scholar

10. In the seventeenth century, copple hats became the trademark headcoverings of English puritan men and women. Ashelford, , Visual History of Costume, 143.Google Scholar

11. Discourse, 157, 126.

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13. Discourse, 157. On the uses of musk, see Classen, Constance, Howes, David, and Synnott, Anthony, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994), 71.Google Scholar

14. Discourse, 97.

15. Ibid., 128–31, 136, 140. Upon hearing her testimony against his wife, Francis “upbraided” Colper and “called her wicked, ungodly woman,” which caused her “to falter in her wordes”; when George asked “that witnesses might not so be used,… the Pastor (as his maner was) waxed very hote.” Francis later apologized privately to Colper's husband, although George told him he should have apologized publicly, since he had berated her in a public meeting.

16. Ibid., 128–29, 131, 136–37.

17. Studies of English separatism are primarily institutional and intellectual histories, rather than social or cultural histories. See, for example, Arber, Edward, The Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, 1606–1623 A.D. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897)Google Scholar; Martyn Dexter, Henry, The England and Holland of the Pilgrims (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905)Google Scholar; Burrage, Champlin, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912)Google Scholar; White, B. R., The English Separatist Tradition: From the Marian Martyrs to the Pilgrim Fathers (London: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Sprunger, Keith L., Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982)Google Scholar; Martin, J. W., Religious Radicals in Tudor England (Ronceverte, W.Va.: Hambledon, 1989)Google Scholar; Acheson, R. J., Radical Puritans in England, 1550–1660 (London: Longman, 1990)Google Scholar; Robert Coggins, James, Smyth's, JohnCongregation: English Separatism, Mennonite Influence, and the Elect Nation (Scottdale, Perm.: Herald, 1991)Google Scholar; Pearse, Meic, The Great Restoration: The Religious Radicals of the 16th and 17th Centuries (Cumbria, U.K.: Pater-noster, 1998).Google Scholar

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19. Forty years ago Morgan, Edmund S. wrote about the now familiar English puritan concept of “visible saints”—“those who appeared to be saved,… those who could demonstrate by their lives, their beliefs, and their religious experiences that they apparently (to a charitable judgment) had received saving faith”—and its contribution to separatist principles of church formation. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (reprint, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965), 3435.Google Scholar

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22. Discussing the role of women in separatism, Crawford, Patricia has noted, “Any woman who tried to challenge male power was … acting contrary to God's order in a deeply sinful way, endangering the whole society because she might infect others with her disobedience and might also provoke God's wrath against those who permitted such license.” Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993/1996), 127Google Scholar. It is interesting to note the similarities between Thomasine Johnson and Massachusetts's Anne Hutchinson: both argued for the independent nature of personal conscience and self-fashioning and were accused of transgressing proper gender roles. However, the outcomes were very different for each: while Thomasine, willing to compromise and with her husband's help, was able to confront her accuser and see him excommunicated, Hutchinson lost the support of influential men and was, herself, excommunicated.

23. Kibbey, Anne, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 49Google Scholar. Miller, Perry described “the plain style” in his well-known discussion of puritan sermon rhetoric, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1939), 331–62.Google Scholar

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34. Dressing the Elite, 3–4.

35. Discourse, 3.

36. Called the Ancient Church because it was the first English separatist congregation to be established in the Netherlands, over three-fourths of its members were less than thirty-four years old. Burrage, , Early English Dissenters, 146–48Google Scholar. For a general history of Francis Johnson's church, see White, , English Separatist Tradition, 91115Google Scholar; Pearse, , Great Restoration, 179–86.Google Scholar

37. Moody, , “Critical Edition,” xxxviiGoogle Scholar; Discourse, 94. George Johnson, the only author who notes her first name, spells it Tomasin and Tomyson, and her last name Boys, Boies, and Bois. Given the notorious inconsistency of spelling in seventeenth-century writing, I have chosen to standardize her name as Thomasine Boyes.

38. Ashelford, , Art of Dress, 48Google Scholar. The Boyes home, in Fleet Street, had been one of several places that Francis's congregation met. Arber, , Story of the Pilgrim Fathers, 107.Google Scholar

39. Quinn, David B., “The First Pilgrims,” William and Mary Quarterly 23 (1966): 374CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moody, , “Critical Edition,” xxx.Google Scholar

40. Discourse, 94–96.

41. By 1593 nineteen male and five female dissenters had died in prison, seventy-two were still incarcerated, and Henry Barrowe, John Greenwood, and John Penry had been executed. Burrage, , Early English Dissenters, 149–52.Google Scholar

42. Discourse, 106.

43. Although George Johnson painted the most detailed portrait of his brother's hot temper, other contemporaries saw him in a similar light. Christopher Lawne called Francis a “cruell persecutor” who “blinded” his congregation; Robert Baillie noted that he “fell to so great oddes … for small matters” with his brother and father; and Richard Bernard condemned both brothers as having “an euill spirit of hatefull and fierie contention.” Lawne, , The Prophane Schisme of the Brownists or Separatists (London: W. Stansby for W. Burke, 1612), 85Google Scholar; Baillie, , A Dissuasive from the Errours of the Time (London: Samuel Gellibrand, 1646), 15Google Scholar; Bernard, , Christian Advertisements and Counsels of Peace (London: F. Kyngston, 1608), 35.Google Scholar

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46. Ibid., 109–13. For a thorough study of the voyage, see Quinn, , “The First Pilgrims,” 359–90.Google Scholar

47. Discourse, 111.

48. Ibid., 113.

49. Ibid., 76.

50. Clyfton, Richard, An Advertisement (1612), 14Google Scholar, cited in Burrage, , Early English Dissenters, 158.Google Scholar

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66. Carolyn Merchant has defined “nature” in this early modern sense as “the properties, inherent characters, and vital powers of persons, animals, or things.” Death of Nature, xxiii. On the malleability of physiological sexual distinctions between male and female, which required the strict social construction of gender distinctions, in early modern England, see Laqueur, Thomas W., Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).Google Scholar

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68. Ribeiro, , Dress and Morality, 70.Google Scholar

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70. Vincent, , Dressing the Elite, 33, cf. 128–29.Google Scholar

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72. Discourse, 128, 135, 97. 300 British pounds in 1595 would be worth approximately 55,000 U.S. dollars in 2005.

73. Robinson, , New Essays, Works, 1:232–33.Google Scholar

74. Discourse, 104.

75. So much scoffing occurred over the five-year-long controversy that George took it upon himself to provide a definition: “a scoffe is not onely in reproachful wordes and gestures joined together, but in the gesture alone, or like the pronouncing of good wordes ironically, disdainfully, or gibingly.” ibid., 119.

76. Ibid., 105.

77. Ibid., 56. Another instance of hyperbolic speech occurred when George refused to explain what he meant by accusing Francis of “carnal vanity,” and Francis expostulated he would “do it” six times, even sixty times. Church members asked him to calm down, but Francis became more heated and claimed he would “do it yea 360 times.” ibid., 143.

78. Gowing, , Domestic Dangers, 5960, 7980.Google Scholar

79. Discourse, 174. Anabaptists were notoriously stringent in “expressing personal holiness of life” and often viewed as hypocritical; opponents criticized their “clok of mortification of the flesche,… and sanctimonious of life.” Pearse, M. T., Between Known Men and Visible Saints: A Study in Sixteenth-Century English Dissent (London: Associated University Presses, 1994), 218–19.Google Scholar

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82. Discourse, 97, 100–101, 172, 111, 173, 125, 143.

83. Ibid., 125–26, 157, 127.

84. Ibid., 174, 98, 175.

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93. Discourse, 65, 59, 73, 14, 74.

94. Vincent, , Dressing the Elite, 158.Google Scholar

95. Discourse, 13, 35, 54.

96. Lake, “‘Charitable Christian Hatred,’” 161; on derogatory views of anabaptists, see n. 79.

97. Even antiseparatist Robert Baillie praised Robinson as “the most learned, polished, and modest spirit that ever that Sect enjoyed. … He ruined the rigid Separation” and started “Semi-separating Independency.” Baillie, , Dissuasive from the Errours, 17.Google Scholar

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