’Materializing Identity’ is concerned with the ambiguous evaluation of veils in early modern Europe. Recently Martha Howell has argued that in late medieval and Reformation Europe ‘the worries about dress were an expression of Europeans’ uncertainty about the link between the material and the immaterial’. The vast and rapidly growing historiography leaves no doubt about the significance of dress for investigating the interdependence of materiality, identity and self-constitution. This applies in particular to the question of veiling, a question, which is still under-researched especially in regard to early modern northern Europe. A close study of the material aspects of dressing codes and changing veiling fashions allows for the discussion of broader questions of the material, its interconnection with moral politics and issues of visibility.

​Omnipresent and ephemeral at the same time, veils and veiling lay at the intersection of various cultural and societal tensions affecting moral concerns. They are an ideal research object through which to inquire about codes of social and moral distinctions. Moreover, veils assume an important place in the period’s artistic production. In Renaissance culture artists showed their specific skills through their virtuoso depiction of veils and pleats and they used the iconography of the veil for a sophisticated reflection on vision, visibility and visual regimes.