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Divided into three sections on cosmetics, clothes and hairstyling, this book explores how early modern women regarded beauty culture and in what ways skin, clothes and hair could be used to represent racial, class and gender identities, and to convey political, religious and philosophical ideals.

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Introduction PART ONE: COSMETICS ´The Beautifying Part of Physic´: Women´s Cosmetic Practices in Early Modern England ´Soveraigne Receipts,´ Fair Beauty, and Race in Stuart England PART TWO: CLOTHES The Greatness in Good Clothes: Fashioning Subjectivity in Mary Wroth´s Urania and Margaret Spencer´s Account Book What Not to Wear: Children´s Clothes and the Maternal Advice of Elizabeth Jocelin and Brilliana, Lady Harley PART THREE: HAIR The Culture of the Head: Hair in Mary Wroth´s Urania and Margaret Cavendish´s ´Assaulted and Pursued Chastity´ An ´absolute mistress of her self´: Anne Clifford and the Luxury of Hair Conclusion Index

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"A masterful, eloquent, and convincing interpretation of the early modern culture of beauty which has vast implications for myriad areas of critical and historical interest beyond this topic alone." Patricia Phillippy, Kingston University, UK

"Snook´s careful and lucid account of early modern women and their beauty practices, and how they variously intersect with hierarchies of power, will be of interest to scholars of early modern women´s writing, material culture, and the history of beauty,

and it is to be commended for its timely re-orienting of the subject towards texts produced by women." Emily O´Brien, Early Modern Studies Journal

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EDITH SNOOK Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. She is the author of Women, Reading and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (2005) and has contributed a chapter to the Palgrave volume The History of Women´s Writing 1500-1610.

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