Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In recent decades, historians have acknowledged the role that women played in shaping and disseminating scientific knowledge during the Enlightenment. Current scholarship also suggests that fashion was a means through which haptic, economic, and practical knowledge was shared among women. This article focuses on one particular fashion accessory – the artificial flower – to explore its contribution to our understanding of women’s knowledge of botany in eighteenth-century France. An analysis of the receipts preserved in the credit records of France’s most famous fashion merchant, Marie-Jeanne (Rose) Bertin (1747–1813), demonstrates high levels of specificity in the flowers that women chose to adorn their outfits. Seventy-five different types of flowers are mentioned using their vernacular names, suggesting that knowledge about a wide variety of flowers was exchanged between fashion merchants and their clients during conversations about clothing. This article therefore casts the fashion merchant’s shop as a site of botanical knowledge generation and exchange.
Source: The Historical Journal
Author: Zara Kesterton
Institution: University of Cambridge
Language: English
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,450
Award: G6981871090
OpenAlex ID: W4402989896