African Gowns and Turkish Buttons: Global Horizons of Material Expertise in a German Town

Abstract

This article enquires into how townspeople in early modern Germany invested objects of foreign origin with meaning in the context of urban material culture. The basis of the argument are two interconnected case studies from Ulm in south-west Germany. The first part analyses how the seventeenth-century merchant Christoph Weickmann made sense of African artefacts which he displayed to visitors in his cabinet of curiosities, showing that his appreciation of them was closely linked to contemporary urban notions, regimes and practices of sartorial distinction. The second part zooms in on another object from Weickmann’s collection, a prayer chain with ‘Turkish’ buttons, the actual origin of which he kept secret. The biography of this object can, however, be reconstructed from the surviving narrative of its maker, Hans Ulrich Krafft, a patrician from Ulm who learned the craft of button-making and besides excelled at repairing mechanical clocks during his captivity in Tripoli in the 1570s. In his narrative, Krafft boasted about his skills as an artisan, but the manuscript was kept in the family. Nor did Weickmann, who later acquired some of the buttons made by Krafft, disclose their story, which would not have befitted a member of the patriciate. The two case studies thus demonstrate how the ‘foreignness’ of such artefacts was just one of several layers of meaning and value that were produced by the local urban community in interaction with the material qualities of the objects.