Befeathering the European: Feathers as Matter in the European Renaissance
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This article contributes to the material turn. It shows how an enquiry into the social life of materiality with distinctive methodologies such as reconstruction and object-led-approaches changes our understanding of the past. It furthermore 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 feather-work in Europe were influenced by encounters with the Americas, whose artistry sixteenth-century Europeans greatly admired. The dyeing of feathers in multiple colours for head-wear 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 age of conspicuous consumption 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.