Sarah Bendall

Sarah is a material culture historian of early modern Europe, specialising in the dress of England, Scotland and France between 1500-1800. Her research explores gendered and embodied experiences, as well as histories of production and consumption, and material ecologies. Her current research focuses on early modern structural fashions made with the material baleen (called "whalebone" in the past). Recent University of Melbourne Masters graduate, Jennifer McFarland, interviewed Sarah about her project and research interests. Sarah is also an active blogger where she recounts her research and process in recreating historical costume items - especially undergarments.

Sarah’s first monograph, Shaping Femininity: Foundation Garments, the Body and Women in Early Modern England, is currently under contract and due for publication in 2021 with Bloomsbury Academic/Visual Arts.

She is also contributor to the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies’ project, Textiles, Trade, and Meaning at the courts of northern Italy during the time of Isabella d’Este. You can read her essay on Isabella’s undergarments here, and find out more about the project here.

Profile image: Baleen in a textile.

relevant publications

Sarah A. Bendall, “The case of the ‘french vardinggale’: A Methodological Approach to Reconstructing and Understanding Ephemeral Garments”, in Fashion Theory, Special Issue on ‘The Making Turn’, edited by Peter McNeil and Melissa Bellanta, 23, 3 (2019): 363-399. DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2019.1603862.

Sarah A. Bendall, “‘Take Measure of your Wide and Flaunting Garments’: The Farthingale, Gender and the Consumption of Space in Elizabethan and Jacobean England”, Renaissance Studies, vol. 33, 5 (2019): 712-737. DOI: 10.1111/rest.12537.

Sarah Anne Bendall, “To Write a Distick upon It: Busks and the Language of Courtship and Sexual Desire in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England”, Gender & History, 26, 2, (2014): 199–222. DOI: 10.1111/1468-0424.12066.