Reputation

For most middling individuals in early modern England, reputation was everything. In Shakespeare’s Othello, Cassio repeats the word three times to pronounce it the “immortal part of me” that distinguishes human from beast. Its importance is largely to be explained by the fact that reputation linked a person’s moral, social, and economic identities. In this period, most individuals depended upon “credit” for financial transactions. But “credit” also denoted someone’s trustworthiness and their status in their community. Accordingly, a libellous or slanderous accusation (one that was allegedly untrue; the former written, the latter spoken) or shaming customs (public rituals exposing “cuckoldry” or excessive scolding from a wife) could have consequences for business dealings or affect one’s ability to borrow money as well as impinge upon one’s moral standing.

The middling were especially dependent upon the reputations enabling financial credit. Many sought to enlarge or establish businesses through borrowing, to take risks on commercial enterprises, or indeed to stand for their friends and families as “sureties” (guaranteeing their moral and financial “reputations”). Community status in this social bracket was also especially precarious, requiring continual displays or performances of moral rectitude; as a result, many were downwardly socially mobile as well as upwardly. Such “sureties” sometimes linked to other displays of status, such as wearing a ring—a sign of one’s material wealth that could be “pawned” or put up as a financial guarantee or deposit. Other visual signs also helped entrench reputation, from portraiture—a display of fashion and significance to those outside of the household—to church pews: where one sat during service could denote respectability; accordingly, changes to seating arrangements were sometimes felt as an attack on an individual’s or social group’s reputation.

The objects assembled here demonstrate the pervasive anxiety in early modern English culture, felt perhaps most acutely among the middling, about protecting and defending reputation and the way individuals or communities weaponised that anxiety. Other objects are signs of human embellishment and material or visual distinction. These not only marked individuals out from what Cassio sees as “the bestial” but cultivated a socially and financially favourable reputation.