Through the Looking Glass: Mirrors, Magic, and Vanity in Early Modern Europe

From being items of great mystery and magic to items of quotidian ubiquity, mirrors have a long and fascinating history. This paper seeks to identify the use of mirrors as metaphors in art and literature, with a primary focus on eighteenth-century France, especially as they relate to the idea of vanity. It also pays special attention to socio-economic developments in the early modern period regarding the widening availability of crystal flat-backed mirrors to argue that the new widespread use of these more accurate mirrors gave ordinary people new tools to be vain, heralding new developments toward our modern world.