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The illustrated album amicorum, or album of friends, is a singular visual example of early modern travelers' fascination with swiftly changing fashions, regional customs, family lineage, and manuscript decoration. 1 A predecessor of the sixteenth-century printed costume book, the illustrated album preserves in its pages colored depictions of dress, local scenes of work and entertainment, modes of transportation (boats, litters or sedan chairs, carriages, horses), regional festivals, games, and civic rituals such as weddings, funerals, and state and religious ceremonies, often with identifying captions written in a contemporary hand. 2 The illustrations reveal a keen attention to major changes in fashionable clothing, particular uses of fabrics and trims, and luxurious accessories such as feathered fans, hats with plumes, precious fabrics, and more. In addition, these albums exemplify the interconnections between the printed book and illustrated manuscript in the early modern period, and call attention to the economic, cultural, and social dynamics affecting their production. 3

Renaissance courts were in constant flux as nobles moved in and out of a ruler's household. 7 These developments had an enormous impact on the material culture of the age, which witnessed an unrestrained accumulation of goods. 8 Luxury objects and fashionable garments were valuable assets that set elite families apart from the working poor. 9 Over two centuries of great economic and demographic expansion (ca. 1450-ca. 1650), new patterns of production, merchandizing, and consumption in the creation and dissemination of paintings, decorative ornaments, tapestries, and illuminated manuscripts, and the design and production of clothing significantly changed what clothing signified to individuals, within their respective communities and across the Continent. 10 Clothing assumed a central position in this "world in motion" as it developed into complex social systems of dress: textiles and trims were acquired in local, urban, and international markets, and individual identities were formed no longer solely according to regional, economic, and political dictates but also in accordance with social, aesthetic, and industrialized processes that embraced both global techniques and individual preferences. Clothing for the upper echelons of society was made of intricate textile weaves and patterns. 11 Aristocrats sought social differentiation through dress codes and elaborate spending because social status depended not only on luxurious cloth but on how cloth was fashioned into garments that followed precise, often individual guidelines. 12 Artifacts or worldly possessions and luxurious clothing, however, were separate and distinct from the household items that constituted instead an individual's patrimony and investment for one's heirs. 13 On account of fluctuations in the amount of textiles produced in the early modern period and "above all, because the values extolling the new, and the need for replacement to keep pace with fashion were late to gain precedence over those of conservation and tradition," as Laurence Fontaine argues, clothing no longer served the purpose of "storing value," given the growing popularity of cheap materials and secondhand markets where clothes could be bought. 14 Once clothing became integrated into a system of social codes, it was subject to ongoing political, economic, religious, and social change. The expansion of Europe meant an unprecedented increase in two-way cultural exchanges of knowledge which Europeans carried into unknown areas around the globe-from West Africa to India, China, and Japan in the east, to the Americas in the west. New settlers brought with them the most recent technological inventions for producing cloth.

Against a system of gender ideologies that defined a woman's social position and intellectual pursuits as private, devoted to domestic concerns and the moral welfare of her family, the emergency of the cortigiana onesta, the intellectual courtesan, dramatically calls into question the humanists’ injunction against women's public status and speech. How did Veronica Franco, the foremost example of the cortigiana onesta in sixteenth-century Italy, succeed in infiltrating the “academy of learned men“? Were any restrictions placed upon her professional activities when she vied with men for public recognition and literary commissions? How did social forces contain or compel the courtesan's cultivation of a literary identity in Venetian society? And finally, what were the maneuvers, both personal and professional, that the cortigiana onesta adopted when she obtained entrance into an elite literary circle and allied herself with powerful male patrons and intellectuals?

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