Alexis Slater // Mimicry, Costume, and the Other: Performing Alterity in Early Modern Northern Europe
In this dissertation, I will examine visual representations of a practice prevalent among Northern European elites in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: dressing up as (imaginary versions of) outsiders like “Turks,” “Moors,” and peasants. I am interested in the ways these alterities functioned as a constitutive outside to calibrate the identities of the costumed urban and courtly elites who performed them while also revealing the porousness of those divisions. My objects of study include depictions of festivities such as prints, printed and painted tournament and festival books, panel and wall paintings. I will situate these images of Otherness in their intellectual context as well, comparing these festive images to the contemporaneous portrayals of 
Others that they existed in dialogue with, ranging from pseudo-ethnographic costume studies/books and images of Ottoman ceremonial to lewd, humorous images of peasant celebrations and inflammatory “news” prints detailing Ottoman attacks. At stake is an understanding of the ways that visual and performative representations of ethno-social Others not only reflected but also shaped conceptions of alterity, and thus identity, in the early modern period.
[Caption: "Der sechste Auffzug oder Inventio von Türcken," Beschreibung und Abriß dero Ritterspiel, so der Durchleuchtige Hochgeborne Fürst und Herr, Herr Moritz, Landgraff zu Hessen... by Wilhelm Dilich (1601) British Library, London, C.107.f.13.]