Sartorial Lives: Royal Wardrobe Accounts and the Life Cycles of the Stuart Queens and the Women who clothed them

This talk examines the Office of the Robes accounts of the Stuart queens of England to show what clothing bills, inventories and financial accounts can tell us about the intimate lives of these queens and the women who clothed them. Such rich manuscript sources reveal how queens prepared for childbed, how they mourned, their preparations for coronations, the effects of ill health and finally, their deaths. It also reveals details about friendships between elite women and those who sold them fashionable goods, as well as familial relationships between fashion retailers, and how marriage and reproduction affected a woman's working life. 

Sarah A. Bendall is a Research Fellow at the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australia Catholic University. She is a gender and material culture historian whose work focuses on the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods between 1500 and 1800. Her first book, Shaping Femininity, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021 and shortlisted for the Society for Renaissance Studies biannual book prize in 2022. She is currently co-investigator on the AHRC-funded Making Historical Dress Network (PI Serena Dyer, DMU) and is writing her second book, The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens.

This is a hybrid seminar. The online seminar will be held on Microsoft Teams and we will send out the link on the day so please check your emails then.
For those attending in person, all visitors must be signed in by a member of KCL staff to enter the building. Please come to the Strand reception for 5.15pm so that we can sign you in. The seminar will begin at 5.30pm.