This paper reports a pilot project to create a visual research resource for 16th century costume. Church effigies are frequently life-size, detailed and dressed in contemporary clothes. The greatest barriers to their use as reference material are their far flung locations and the lack of a detailed inventory with accurate descriptions. The project reported here investigated the practicality and usefulness of a database of images of effigies as source material for costume historians, costumiers and educators. It produced an online image library of 40 individual effigies or groups of effigies in civilian dress in Hampshire churches including 23 women, 15 men and two mixed gender groups dating from 1510 to 1601 although there were no effigies for 1541 to 1550 or 1591 to 1600. It also highlighted specific difficulties such as the technical demands of database management and the challenge of dating effigies accurately.
Jane Malcolm‐Davies (Tue,) studied this question.