Early Modern Textiles

A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.

Why were beards suddenly stylish in Europe after 1500? Why did the ruff come in and out of use in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries? Why did men from Spain to Sweden suddenly decide to adopt wigs around 1660 only to drop the less than fifty years later? How did manufacturers and merchants encourage and then respond to changing demands for colourful printed patterns and new cuts and styles of tailoring in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? As importantly, why were some novelties and innovations quickly adopted while others were unsuccessful? This book, the result of a three-year Humanities in the European Research Area project 'Fashioning the Early Modern: Creativity and Innovation in Europe, 1500-1800', brings together essays which answer these questions. It explores the means by which fashion ideas were disseminated, through pattern books, gazettes, and early newspapers as well as by barbers, seamstresses, tailors, and weavers. Spanning three hundred years from 1500 to 1800, the book turns to material culture to answer questions about economic and social innovation in Continental Europe, England, and Scandinavia. The essays demonstrate the value of turning to surviving objects, from knitted stockings to silk swatches, and the understanding that emerges when we take fashion seriously. -- from dust jacket.

Textiles have long provided metaphors for storytelling: a compelling novel “weaves a tapestry” and we enjoy hearing someone “spin” a tale. To what extent, however, should we take these metaphors seriously? Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama reveals that in the early modern period, when cloth-making was ubiquitous and high-quality tapestries called arras hangings were the most valuable objects in England, such metaphors were literal. The arras in particular provided a narrative model for writers such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, who exploited their audience’s familiarity with weaving to engage them in highly idiosyncratic and “hands on” ways. Specifically, undescribed or “blank” tapestries in the period’s fiction presented audiences with opportunities to “see” whatever they desired, and thus weave themselves into the story. Far more than background objects, literary and dramatic arras hangings have much to teach us about the intersections between texts and textiles at the dawn of print, and, more broadly, about the status of visual art in post-Reformation England. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

Today's world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colourful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier globalised economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialisation of Europe. By the early nineteenth century, India, China and the Ottoman Empire switched from world producers to buyers of European cotton textiles, a position that they retained for over two hundred years. This is a fascinating and insightful story which ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe.

Clothing for a marriage made in heaven : the role of textiles in ecclesiastical consecration rites / Evelin Wetter Love and resurrection : the Luxembourg dynasty's funeral garments at St Vitus Cathedral in Prague / Christoph BrachmannAll that glitters : cloth of gold as a vehicle for display 1300-1550 / Lisa Monnas The making of appearances at the 1530 Augsburg Imperial Diet / Ulinka Rublack The two faces of power : the image strategy of Cosimo I de' Medici / Roberta Orsi Landini Representatives of power tapestries made for kings and emperors / Katja Schmitz-von Ledebur Virtue and vice : clothing and kingship at the courts of Charles I and Charles II (1625-85) / Maria Hayward Arrayed in splendour : an africanist's perspective / Victoria L. Rovine.

A theory of the textile arts is notably lacking from the narrative of western art history. This absence is surprising in light of the great esteem for textiles in medieval and early modern European material culture. The present volume questions the reductive modern paradigm of painting and extends the canon of media in contemporary academic practice. Authors seek to reconstruct a neglected historical textile discourse from visual and literary sources and to weave a historical picture of a self-aware, but hitherto particularly taciturn medium of art. This book exposes meanings of the textile in early modern visual arts and literature from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives.