What goes up must come down: the decline of the renaissance codpiece

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• Victoria Miller, Faculty of History
• Tuesday 17 February 2015, 13:10-14:00
• The Richard King Room, Darwin College.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Dr Duncan Needham.

After prevailing for over fifty years, the trend for sporting a codpiece was on the wane by the end of the sixteenth century: the accessory appears less frequently in contemporary portraiture, and literary sources begin to refer to the garment as an outdated fad. As Rosita Levi Pisetzky points out, the garment would seem already out of fashion by the time Cesare Vecellio’s ‘Habiti Antichi et Moderni’ was published (circa 1589). My research proposes to trace the fall of the codpiece in early modern male fashion by closely exploring the final stages of this salient trend. Why did this once ubiquitous article of male attire disappear, and what new styles emerged in its place?

This talk is part of the Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• AUB_Cambridge Seminars
• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
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• Chris Davis' list
• Darwin College Humanities and Social Sciences Seminars
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• Neurons, Fake News, DNA and your iPhone: The Mathematics of Information
• The Richard King Room, Darwin College
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