The world in a book : the creation of the global in sixteenth-century costume books

Abstract

Richard Hakluyt in his Principal Navigations advised would-be explorers in their mission to discover a north-eastern passage to China to carry with them two types of book. The first was an updated ‘new Herball and such books as make shew of Herbes, Plantes, Trees, Fishes, Foules, and Beastes of all Regions’. The second type of book to be used ‘to astonish the natives’ and as a reference guide to foreign lands was what Hakluyt called ‘the book of the attire of all nations’. Hakluyt referred to what today are commonly called costume books, collections of the costumes of different people in Europe and other parts of the world. By the time Hakluyt published the first edition of his travel narratives in 1589, at least a dozen such costume books had been published in France, Italy and Germany in the previous twenty-five years. In the following decade the genre of the costume book reached maturity with the publication of Cesare Vecellio’s two editions of his Habiti antichi et moderni, comprising more than four hundred plates each.