Department of English

• Monday, March 30, 2026 - 5:15pm to 7:15pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

On Monday, we are thrilled to welcome Ann Rosalind Jones (Smith College) and Peter Stallybrass ( University of Pennsylvania) for a talk titled, “Expelling European Jews? The Printing and Reprinting of a Renaissance Costume Book.”

Profs. Jones and Stallybrass write:

"In general, Renaissance costume books were surprisingly egalitarian in their depictions of the clothing of “almost” (poene) the entire world, as one such book puts it. Some few were organized alphabetically, as in the Latin-French version of François Desprez’s French costume book, published in a Latin translation in Antwerp in 1572, where the “Aegyptius,” “Aegyptius Mulier” and the black “Aethiops” precede the representation of any European. And although compilers introduced a variety of hierarchical sequences, for instance beginning with the Holy Roman Emperor or a Venetian doge, they often followed the organization of map-makers, who moved from the Northwest (e.g. England or the Low Countries) to the East (the Ottoman Empire). The first edition of Abraham de Bruyn’s Habiti starts with Antwerp commoners and the encyclopedic impulse worked powerfully against any hierarchy of nations and sometimes even of their inhabitants’ social status.

The central principle of costume books was place: belongingness (the heimlich) was the crucial defining feature of who could be represented. A man or woman came from Florence or Mainz or Brittany or Catalonia or Hadrianapolis. But where did Jews belong? They were repeatedly depicted in the cosmopolitan world of the Ottoman Empire. But their presence in Europe was simply erased from the genre. There were, however, two exceptions to this general rule: Pietro Bertelli’s Diversarum nationum habitus, first printed in Padua in 1589, and Abraham de Bruyn’s Omnium poene gentium imagines, first printed in Cologne in 1577.

Our talk will be concerned with the appearance, erasure and reappearance of European Jews in multiple copies (and three “editions”) of de Bruyn’s costume book."

Ann Rosalind Jones is Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature at Smith College. Her scholarship focuses on early modern European literature, with particular attention to women’s writing, translation, and the intersections of text and material culture. She is the author of  The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 and translator and editor (with Margaret F. Rosenthal) of The Clothing of the Renaissance World (Europe, Asia, Africa, America): Cesare Vecellio's 'Habiti Antichi et Moderni,' among other works. Her scholarship has been widely recognized for its contributions to feminist criticism and early modern studies, and she has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others.

On March 28 at 2 PM EST, Prof. Jones will be delivering the Eda G. Diskant Memorial Lecture at the Philadelphia Art Museum on "Style and Status in Four Tudor Portraits." More information and a registration link can be found here: https://www.philamuseum.org/events/eda-g-diskant-memorial-four-tudor-portraits

Peter Stallybrass is the Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, founder of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts, and scholarly collaborator nonpareil.  His work explores the material history of books, clothing, and everyday objects, as well as the relationships between text, memory, and social life. He is the author (with Allon White) of The Politics and Poetics of Transgression and (with James Green) of Benjamin Franklin, Printer and Writer, and co-editor (with Margreta de Grazia and Maureen Quilligan) of Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. His research has had a major impact on the fields of book history, early modern studies, and material culture, and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others.

Jones and Stallybrass are coauthors of Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, which was awarded the Modern Language Association's 2001 James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding literary or linguistic study.