Sometimes you get it wrong
When I started researching Anne Lambe, I knew very little about her beyond the sermon preached at her funeral1. Her father was recorded as Thomas Lambe, Esq., and the sermon tells us that Anne was from Suffolk. I wanted to find a connection between Anne Lambe and Lady Wentworth, her patron or companion. Anne was twenty-four when she married Thomas Glover, which made her relatively old to be still unmarried. She was a gentlewoman living with Lady Cecily Wentworth, which sugges
Jan Sayer
4 days ago
Across the Courts of Europe: A Clue to the Palmwood Dress
Fashion has always crossed social and geographical boundaries, passing from wealthy women to those of more modest means and from one social circle to the next. Across Europe, aristocratic women enthusiastically exchanged ideas. Styles also travelled through pattern books, drawings, paintings and fashionably dressed dolls. A court dress? It has long been my theory, and you may disagree, that the Palmwood silk dress was a court dress from the very early seventeenth century. I i
Jan Sayer
4 days ago
Buttonholes
I am very fond of buttonholes, or knoopsgaten in Dutch. It is not a fashionable enthusiasm, but it is a useful one.
Jan Sayer
Sep 15
The Problem of Names
Why two Thomases and two Annes are not an accident, but a reflection of seventeenth-century England.
Jan Sayer
Sep 14