Befeathering the European: The Matter of Feathers in the Material Renaissance

Abstract

Abstract This article contributes to the material turn. It shows how an inquiry into the social life of materiality, with distinctive methodologies such as reconstruction and object-led-approaches, changes our understanding of the past. It advances our thinking about the emergence and significance of cross-cultural objects in the context of cultural exchange. The article charts the spectacular rise in importance of feathers in dress during the Renaissance, its relation to collecting practices and relevance well into the seventeenth century. It argues that meanings of featherwork in Europe were influenced by encounters with the Americas, whose artistry sixteenth-century Europeans greatly admired. The dyeing of feathers in multiple colors for headwear and its crafting into intricate shapes turned into a major European fashion trend. Crafts and materials linked to embodied sensory perception and emotional responses. This revises accounts which present this age purely as one of conspicuous consumption designed to celebrate the prestige of rich patrons and instead enquires into how materials interacted with human perception and the mind. Male consumers decisively shaped taste communities. To understand this uncharted and surprising history we need to explore the first age of globalization.