“A Poppet-Queen, Drest up by me”: Dolls, Propriety, and Girlhood in Early Modern Europe

A rare, sixteenth-century doll resembling a well-dressed courtly woman survives in the collection at the Royal Armory in Stockholm, Sweden, which scholars have categorized as primarily a fashion doll, though it might also have functioned as a plaything. A nineteenth-century museum label states the doll belonged to “Charles IX’s princess,” suggesting that at one point, the doll might have been played with by one of his wives or daughters. In early modern Europe, children across the economic spectrum had access to dolls made from a variety of materials, including cloth, wood, and metal. Though rare, there are several extant examples of well-preserved dolls from this period. Thus far, scholarship on pre-eighteenth-century dolls has focused primarily on dolls’ houses created for adults and fashion dolls used in the dissemination of sartorial knowledge, despite an abundance of evidence indicating that they were also playthings for girls. This study builds a case for the importance of considering dolls as entertainment and didactic tools, the means by which early modern European girls practiced and learned socially expected female propriety, bodily comportment, and appropriate dress. By examining material and visual evidence of dolls, including family and individual portraits of children, genre paintings, and prints, with contemporary prescriptive literature, letters, diaries, inventories, and other textual references, this paper provides insights into how early modern girls played with dolls, and the lessons this play taught them about the social roles and behavior they were expected to perform as they grew into women.