Early Modern Costume Books and Albums

In the early modern period, costume books and albums participated in the shaping of a new visual culture that displayed the diversity of the people of the known world on a variety of media including maps, atlases, screens, and scrolls. At the crossroads of early anthropology, geography, and travel literature, this textual and visual production blurred the lines between art and science.

Costume books and albums were not a unique European production: in the Ottoman Empire and the Far East, artists and geographers also pictured the dress of men and women of their own and faraway lands, hybridizing the Renaissance western tradition. Acknowledging this circulation of knowledge and people through migration, travel, missionary, and diplomatic encounters, this Element contributes to the expanding field of early modern cultural studies in a global perspective.