If you've ever been to a Renaissance Faire (I have), you know that
the concept is less Queen Elizabeth and more Don Key-Ho-Tee's Medieval
Potlucke WITH BREASTS. Or at least it was 10 years ago when a Ren-friend
and I ate shepherd's pie, looked at chain-mail, and — once we'd soaked
in enough of the Worlde and its high freckled bosoms — tried some
boob-hoisting ourselves.
Putting a corset on is tough, and the instructions I received at the
Faire went as follows: Lean down, shove your boobs into it, straighten
up, then pop them up so they'll show through the dress. It may or may
not surprise you that a) these instructions came from the amiable
sales-fellow, and b) I walked around the booth with a nipple on display
until my friend came out of her dressing room.
If this story has a moral, it's that cleavage-wrangling is complex.
My God! I thought.
How did the ladies of yore do it?
I'm finally in a position to find out. Picture it: It's the
seventeenth century. Bras don't exist yet. As a typical woman, what do
you do?
Option 1: Consult a Reference Work! You might turn to the
Ladies' Dictionary. Published in 1694, here's the entry marked “Breasts”:
how to make them Plump and Round: Breasts that
hang loose, and are of an extraordinary largeness, lose their charms,
and have their Beauty buried in the grave of uncomeliness, whilst those
that are small, plump and round, like two ivory globes, or little worlds
of beauty, whereon Love has founded his Empire, command an awful homage
from his vassals, captivate the wondering gazer's eyes, and dart warm
desires into his Soul, that make him languish and melt before the soft
Temptation.
That there's your goal. Now, what to do if you're saddled with large
breasts whose beauty is buried in the grave of uncomeliness? The
Ladies' Dictionary is here to help.
Therefore to reduce those Breasts that hang flagging out
of all comely shape and form, that they may be plump, round and smaller,
bind them up close to you with caps or bags that will just fit them,
and so let them continue for some nights. Then take carrot-seed,
plantain-seeds, aniseeds, fennel-seeds, cumin-seeds, of each two ounces,
virgin's honey an ounce, the juice of plantain and vinegar two ounces
each. Bruise and mingle them well together. Then, unbinding your breast,
spread the composition plaster-wise and lay it on your breasts, binding
them up close as before. After two days and two nights, take off the
plasters and wash your breasts with white wine and rose-water.
Got that? Basically, fashion a fitted homemade bra out of caps or
bags, stuff it with seeds and honey, and marinate in the fruit of your
loom for two days.
Then what?
In so doing for twelve or fourteen days together, you
will find them reduced to a curious plumpness and charming roundness.
Wash them then with water of Benjamin, and it will not only whiten them,
but make their azure veins appear in all their intricate meanders, till
the Lover in tracing them loses himself.
Whew. Right? Plastic surgeons, take note: This is what those
“After” photos you wallpaper restrooms with should convey. (Minus the
veins, which you will no doubt recommend cauterizing because circulation
is so 1694. Oh, and get better fonts.)
Now that you have your breasts tight, round, and full of blue veins,
you might notice that there's a tad too much pink in your skin tone.
Tricky, this. If your complexion happens to be on the ruddy side, the
Ladies' Dictionary must
regrettably advise against the widespread practice of exposing your
face and naked breast to the moon at night, “as if the Moon (because
pale herself) would make them so, or by spitting in their Faces, scour
off the Crimson dye.” This is a silly thing to do, ladies. Dew is
moon-spit. It won't wash your color off, and moontanning isn't a thing.
So ease up on those half-naked midnight strolls.
Option 2: Go Elizabethan or Go Home!
Before we consider Option 2, we probably need to clarify a few
things, since our collective understanding of corsets, bodices, busks,
stomachers, stays, smocks, petticoats, and chemises is probably a remix
of
The Tudors, Shakespeare in Love, and
Blackadder.
So here's a Ladies' Dictionary of our own:
1. Bodice
Foundation garment, sometimes the top part of a dress. Think of it as
the foremother of the corset. It literally means “pair of bodies.” If
you're John Donne, you pun dirtily on what that pair of bodies can do.
If you're
Nehemiah Grew,
you use the bodice to explain plant anatomy: “A Flower without its
Empalement, would hang as uncouth and tawdry as a Lady without her
Bodies.” Oh, Nehemiah.
By the same token, bodice-makers are body-makers. True story! There
was a whole debate about how dishonest ladies were being by wearing
bodies that weren't their own. Pictures of surviving bodices (or bodies,
but blech) are
here. Oh, and sometimes there's a fancy stomacher that covers up the lacing of the bodice if it's in the front. Here's a
1630s bodice without a stomacher. Here's a
picture of a bodice with a busk.
2. Busk
Busks were straight, hard, and erect (!). They were sometimes made of steel or whalebone. Here's
a close-up of one with
a portrait (in case you wanted a young man in your bodice). The busk
went between the breasts, sometimes down below the waist, to keep the
whole body straighter. The twentieth century had those jeans that said
“Lucky You” in the fly; busks said things like “Love joins them” or “The
arrow unites us.” (Get it? The busk is the arrow that unites the
boobs.)
Some busks were downright filthy: “How I envy you the happiness that
is yours, resting softly on her ivory white breast. Let us divide
between us, if you please, this glory. You will be here the day and I
shall be there the night.”
People weren't too happy about busks, partly because they made women
hard and man-like—sort of like putting on a carapace of man-body, and
partly because they were sexy. Stephen Gosson writes in 1596: “The bawdy
busk that keeps down flat / The bed wherein the babe should
breed,” by which he meant that it caused abortions.
3. Whalebone Stays
Whalebone usually isn't whalebone. It's baleen, obtained from north
right whales. It was especially useful because it was hard and durable
but also flexible and strong, even when cut into narrow pieces, which
were sometimes called
stays.
Those bits, the stays, could be used on children as young as two or
three. Boys and girls. Didn't matter. Their bones were softer, so they
were easier to shape at that age.
Okay, back to option B: Elizabeth!
Depending on when you were born, fashion was probably cycling through a
love-hate relationship with geometry. They might try to flatten you into
a triangle or turn you into a cone. Under Elizabeth, busks that
flattened your chest and breasts were all the rage. (The eighteenth
century was really into
hip rectangles for some reason.)
Under your bodice you might wear a smock. Or drawers. Over your
bodice you might wear a dress. Or your bodice might be fancy enough to
stand on its own. Add a busk or stomacher and a skirt, probably with a
fardingale to shape your hips properly, and you're good to go.
Separates!
That's the theory, and it's mostly right. But we're interested in the practice, right?
The crazy thing about Elizabethan fashion is that it did a lot more gender-bending than it ever gets credit for.
Sandy Feinstein
points out that under Elizabeth: “women's fashion was in fact little
different in style and design from men's fashion. Women
attempted to imitate the contours of male dress and in so doing
wore the same garments as men, including undergarments—and this
before the advent of trousers. To mention only the most obvious,
stockings, ruffs, and stomachers were worn by both sexes; less
obviously, corsets or bodices.”
It makes sense if you think about it: Elizabeth had to assert
authority, and girding herself in a way that deemphasized feminine
curves seems like one way to do it. For her subjects to follow suit is
not surprising: see Kate Middleton for examples of how we plebes respond to royal fashion.
People's reactions to these whiffs of androgyny were mixed.
Barnaby Rich
points out that the function of the busk was “to straighten a
lascivious body.” Others were less convinced that the lasciviousness was
in check. Take
Viscount Francis Boyle Shannon, who's miffed that ladies have taken to wearing young men's doublets:
now they're coming for the breeches too:
“And for the breeches most of our young Sparks, and some
of the old Fops have lost them also, being generally given by our
Gallants to their Mistresses, and by the mere Country Gentlemen to their
Wives, which by the by, is a new Mode that contradicts the old law: to
confound the Habits of several sexes. So that if our women increase thus
in power, and our men continue so in folly, 'tis very probable that
those of the next age may see our English modists pictured as they do
Truth, that's naked.
In short, having tried on a little androgyny, women were going all
the way and starting to wear men's clothes. And swords. And cutting
their hair short. These were the roaring girls. (There's
a play about one, and it's awesome.)
Now, if you're wondering about the male side of fashion, the male
version of the busk/bodice was the doublet. The Elizabethan peascod was
designed to make men's stomachs look sexily huge and round. They usually
had to stuff a bunch of fabric in there to fill out the silhouette, and
sometimes they had to stuff their hose with bran to make their thighs
look less skinny. This all started in the sixteenth-century, when the
gents followed the ladies' example and busked themselves on up. Partly,
Feinstein thinks, because they saw the new lady-silhouette as a
masculine “outer shell”:
The corset as a protective device embodies masculine
associations; morally in danger of man, it is as if woman puts on the
man over her vulnerable womanhood, which is, however, preserved—indeed
exaggerated—beneath. The very act of hardening and stiffening
herself, which is on one level defensive, becomes a militant form of
transference to herself of masculine eroticism.
So the bodice was a way for you to put on a man-carapace. Feinstein
also says that “while busks may have been associated with sex appeal,
and … prostitution, it was apparently also feared that they enabled
women not only to look like "gallants" but act like them as well: that
is, women might have felt freer to have sex if they thought they could
guard against pregnancy.”
The Elizabethan torso, in other words, wasn't just conical and
restrictive (which it was). It was also badass and a form of built-in
birth control. Elizabeth took clothes and what they signified seriously.
Fun fact: she empowered officers to break swords that violated the
length limit and trim runaway ruffs. Here's Anne Hollander's description
of the Elizabethan female body (OMG “very little width of beam”):
Broad hips were apparently of little interest in the
erotic conception of the female torso; the sixteenth-century nude shows
very little width of beam, just as she shows very little swell or
droop of breast. Vertically extended expanses of belly and thigh were
still the favorite nude- female landscapes, and breasts and buttocks
were seen as subsidiary attendants of these. In general the female body
of the High Renaissance appears to have been conceived as a long,
large stomach stretching from the collarbone to the crotch, with breasts
the shadowiest of swellings visible chiefly because of the placement
of the nipples.
Option 3. Embrace the Curvy Seventeenth Century.
In the seventeenth century, things started to move away from the
“straight” Elizabethan fashion and toward serious curves. This is the
beginning of the corset fashion we know. Here's how the
Ladies' Dictionary describes what ladies do in the mornings after fixing their hair:
Then they begin to commit their body to a close
Imprisonment, and pinch it in so narrow a compass that the best part of
its plumpness is forced to rise toward the Neck to emancipate it self
from such hard Captivity. And, being grown of her liberty, appears with a
kind of pleasant briskness, which becomes her infinitely. As for her
fair Breasts, they are half-imprisoned and half free; and do their
utmost endeavour to procure their absolute liberty by shoving back that
which veils the one half, but they are too weak to effect it, and whilst
they strive to free themselves they cast over a veil, which perfectly
hides them. The desire they have to be exposed to view, makes them beat
it back.
If you're surprised by how hard these breasts are fighting to procure their absolute liberty, don't worry. [
Spoiler alert!] They shall overcome.
In the meantime, let's absorb a little more crankiness about womanly artifice. Here's the
Ladies' Dictionary entry for “Pride”:
Our men are grown so effeminate, and our women so
man-like, that (if it might be) I think they would exchange genders.
What modest eye can with patience behold the immodest gestures and
attires of our women? No sooner with them, is infancy put on, but
impudency is put on: they have turned Nature into Art; so that a man can
hardly discern a woman from her image. Their bodies they pinch in, as
if they were angry with Nature, for casting them in so gross a mould:
but as for their looser parts, them they let loose, to prey upon
whatsoever, their last darting eyes shall seize upon. Their breasts,
they lay to the open view, like two fair Apples, of which whosoever
tasteth, shall be sure of the knowledge of evil, of good I dare not
warrant him.
Ladies. Those ivory globes aren't flattened any more. They're pushed
up and on display, they're apples, and the waists, they're pinched way
in, and now all the wobbly bits are extra-wobbly and you can't tell
what's real and what isn't! A hundred years after Elizabeth and still
the men are woman-like and the women are man-like, except for their
aggressive apples, with which they will damn your immortal soul.
The men aren't the only ones distressed by the new trend towards tiny waists. The writer of another guide,
The Gentlewoman's Companion (we think the author was Hannah Wooley), argues that mothers would never do it if they understood the consequences.
Did they know how speedily and willfully they destroy you
by girding your tender bodies, certainly they would prove kinder
Mothers than be your cruel murderers. For by this means they reduce your
bodies into such pinching-extremities, that it engenders a stinking
breath; and by cloistering you up in a Steel or Whale-bone-prison, they
open a door to Consumptions, with many other dangerous inconveniences,
as crookedness: for Mothers striving to have their daughters' bodies
small in the middle, do pluck and draw their bones awry, for the
ligatures of the back being very tender at that age, and soft and moist,
with all the Muscles, do easily slip aside. Thus Nurses, whilst they
too straitly do lace the breasts and sides of children on purpose to
make them slender, do occasion the breast-bone to cast it self aside,
whereby one shoulder doth become bigger and fuller than the other.
Don't get any ideas, though. The
Gentlewoman's Companion
isn't saying you shouldn't have any laces at all. You need some
whalebone, or else you'll let yourself go loose like the fake-fat
Venetians who don't lace and want to be fat and stuff their garments so
they'll look fatter.
Though I would not have too great a restriction laid on
your bodies, yet I would not have them by inconsiderate looseness run
out into a deformed corpulency, like the Venetian-Ladies, who seldom
lace themselves at all, accounting it an excellency in proportion to be
round and full-bodied: and that they may attain that (merely supposed)
comeliness, if Nature incline them not to be somewhat gross or
corpulent, they will use art, by counterfeiting that fulness of body, by
the fullness of garments.
There is a happy medium, the
Gentlewoman's Companion says. And you might be thinking to yourself that you know what that looks like. Maybe it looks something like this:
Or like this:
And you're probably guessing that all the gents who objected to the
Elizabethan fashion, which they found overly “manly,” would be pleased
with the new rage for curves. And you'd be right. But you'd also be
wrong.
There is a new development, you see.
Invasion of the Booby-Snatchers
“We find by lamentable, if I may not say fatal, Experience, that the the world too much allows nakedness in Women.”
That's the first line of the “Naked Breasts” entry of the
Ladies' Dictionary.
Uh oh.
“There is always danger in attentively looking upon a Naked Breast,
and there is not only a great danger, but a kind of Crime in beholding
it with attention in the Churches.”
Well, indeed.
“If we cannot prevent this disorder, let us strive with him to make
these women know how great their fault is in coming to church in such
undecent habit, and if I may presume to say, so as it were half naked.
Do you come to the house of God as to a Ball?”
Well?
Do you?
As you're probably gathering, there's a crisis in the offing. Breasts
were scary when they were strapped down, but now, instead of carrying
swords, the ladies are just using their Dementor-boobs, which is so much
worse. And they know it, the hussies.
“Surely then they cannot be exempt from blame who do show their
breasts and shoulders at so extreme a rate, since they cannot possibly
be ignorant that that nakedness must needs be much more powerful than
words to excite the motions of Concupiscence. For who does not know that
the eyes are the Guides of Love, and that it is through them that it
most commonly steals into our souls?”
It gets worse, guys. Your boobs?
They can talk.
“A naked breast and bare shoulders are continually speaking to our
hearts, in striking and wounding our Eyes; and their language, as dumb
as it is, is so much the more dangerous as it is not understood but by
the mind, and the mind is pleased with the understanding it.”
Necks talk too!
“The beauty of a neck which is presented to our eyes hath nothing but
what attracts and allures us, and as it does not cease speaking to us
in its way and manner, nor cease soliciting us, and being pleasing to
us, it at last triumphs over our liberty, after it has abused and
betrayed our senses.”
Dangerous things, necks. But not as dangerous as bosoms:
“Men do very well know how dangerous it is to look upon a naked
bosom, and your vain and light women are sensible how advantageous it is
to them to show it.”
What's worse, the ladies are thinking of their own breasts, and the
men—well, the men get hypnotized into thinking that the breasts are a
sort of shorthand for the entire body.
The idea of their breasts does not less enter into their
imagination than into that of the men, who consider it attentively, and
commend it, [Ed. I love that they consider the breasts attentively and commend them]
and … join the idea of all the Body to that of their breasts, being
persuaded that they shew the beauty of the one to make that of the other
be better judged of.
Things get weirder, guys. I give you The Address to the Nipple for the Sake of Your Immortal Soul:
“Dainty Nipples (said that excellent Moralist to a wanton Gallants)
why do ye so labour to tempt and take deluded eyes? Must not poor
wormelins one day tug you? Must those enazured orbs for ever retaine
their beauty?”
Your beauty will fade, nipple! Your spectacular blue-veined breast will someday decay, and worms will eat you! REPENT!
If you're like me, you were surprised to see the address to the
nipple. For obvious reasons. But also because, for all this talk of
“naked breasts,” you assumed that was hyperbole. The prudery of the age.
Naked breasts. Ha. That's just cleavage, clearly. Right?
Wrong.
I give you the Duchess of Monmouth:
I raise you the Buxom Virgin:
I'll add the Countess of Somerset:
Mix it with a pinch of:
a drop of:
and a dollop of:
And you will see a hitherto unsuspected option emerge (ahem).
Option 4: Go bare.
Behold the seventeenth-century moment in which it was the fashion to let
the nips fly free. The real moral of my Renaissance Faire experience is
that I did it right. If you're a fashion-forward seventeenth-century
woman, you pull 'em out of the dress and enjoy.
Images courtesy of the English Broadside Ballad Archive and the British Museum. Spelling and punctuation has been modernized.
**This article is not mine. It was written by Lili Loofbourow for TheHairpin. The original may be found here. I have not altered it in any way nor do I claim any ownership of it.
When the Great Ansei Edo Earthquake struck what is now Tokyo, Japan on November 11th, 1855 there was only one thing on the minds of the survivors: Death to the catfish!
