Perpetuana was a woollen fabric made and used in early modern England and elsewhere for clothing and furnishings including bed hangings.
Lord William Howard of Naworth Castle bought broadcloth in November 1617 and six yards of lighter green perpetuana in June 1618 for the clothes of his servant George Armstrong.
[14] In 1640, Sir William Calley of Chiseldon and Burderop Park, a retired cloth merchant, asked his steward Richard Harvey to buy "broad black perpetuana" to make suits for three servants.
[15] The account book of William Fitzwilliam of Milton Hall includes the making of two pairs of perpetuana hose trimmed with gold and silver lace around the year 1610.
In Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels of 1600, a character Hedon suggests that courtiers should wear silks rather than perpetuana, and the gentleman ushers of the court ought to exclude such tough "terrible coarse rags" and "rubbing devices" from the royal presence.
Black perpetuana was used to make a costume for a madman in Thomas Campion's Masque of Lords and Honourable Maids, performed at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate.
[29] Olfert Dapper, a 17th-century writer, mentioned that men of the Guinea Coast wore outfits made from a variety of fabrics or stuffs including perpetuana in his Description of Africa (1668).