Leeds report 6: Session 1203

[aryanhwy]

Session 1203: Dress, Textile, and Convention (or Not), II
1203-a: The Evidence for Textiles and Dress in the Household Accounts (1498-1509) of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Mother of Henry VII, Sue Powell, University of Salford.

The speaker has been working on editing the household papers of Lady Margaret Beaufort, to be published in the next few years. In this paper she looked at books of receipts/payments and accounts of the cofferer and treasurer of the chambers, accounts of the treasurers of the household, and accounts of the chamberlain, to see what types of textiles and dressgoods were mentioned. These fall into five categories:

(1) Regular purchases of ready-made items for the househld, such as shoes, black caps, bonnets, hose, linen cloth, russet satin, sartup (a type of rustic book); these were both for her ladyship's usage and for her household staff, pensioners, almspeople, and choir boys.

(2) Occasional purchases for herself: fur for a kirtle, cotton lining for a stomacher, shoes & slippers, buskins, pinson (a type of shoe), canvas to carry it all home in.

(3) Special occasions: dress for Maundy ceremonies. Her reception at Arthur and Katherine's wedding. Clothes distributed at Maundy. The farewell reception for Margaret before she left for Scotland. In 1501 for Katherine's wedding reception, the list of purchases included damask, satin, chamlet, sarsenet, gold wire, etc. In 1504 after the death of Thomas Stanley (her husband), there is mention of dying say into black (presumably for mourning purposes).

(4) Special purchases for textile furnishing.

(5) Household furnishings: tapestries, described as "counterfett arres" -- imitation? Pillows, mantles, bedclothes, chapel vestments.

If anyone knows what "sophanies", "peyse", or "peoise" are, the speaker would like to know!

1203-b: The Liturgical Vestments of Castel Sant'Elia: Their Historical Significance and Current Condition, Maureen C. Miller, University of California-Berkeley.

The collection at the Castel Sant'Elia in Italy contains some vestments: they are made of coarse cotton and linen. They are humble--perhaps typical--liturgical vestments. They date before 1258, except for one early modern piece, except that the garments were in continual use and modified as needed. The bulk date from the early 12th to the early 13th C; the church was rebuilt around 1126, and it would make sense that they would make new vestments then. More than half of the chasubles are coarse linen/cotton, though some have a color runner in silk, or of plain cotton. It's not clear when these runners were added. 3 vestments are a bit more sumptuous: they have a linen warp and a silk weft, and are dyed blue.

The collection also displays the interesting phenomenon of reliquary vestments, vestments that were preserved due to associations with old saints. One can in fact be associated with a saint: the Vitalis chasuble. It was made of 11th C silk, so it clearly wasn't worn by the 8th C saint, but it may have been created for some commemorative occasion.

There's also a practice of repackaging old fragments to keep using them in new vestments. For example, in a 17th C reconfiguration of one of the chasubles, very tiny pieces of brown, green, and gold cloth were concealed under the neckline. Such fragments would have been included because of a devotional motive.

1203-c: The Art of Translating Text into Tapestry: Pierre Desray and the Troyes Mémoire, Tina Kane, Vassar College.

The creation of a tapestry can be outlined in 9 steps: (1) a donor decides he wants a tapestry, (2) a scholar is hired to design/write the story, (3) the detailed program is created, (4) the artist is hired, (5) the small sketch is drawn, (6) a full-scale cartoon is made, (7) the materials are chosen, (8) the tapestry loom and weavers is chosen, (9) tapestry is finished.

Tapestries begin with texts: They are illustrations to a story. In a way, they are a type of theatre, or a medieval equivalent to a movie. However, the text rarely survives because it is usually destroyed once the tapestry is made. The text considered by this speaker survived likely because the tapestry was never made. It details the lives of two saints, Cecilia, the patron of music, & Urban, the first pope of this name, who was the son of a Troyes shoemaker, so it made sense that he'd be celebrated here.

There are 6 tapestry panels that were planned. Clearly the plans were used, since there are paint splotches on the notebooks. The author of the notebooks is identified by his motto, "All in good faith". He was Pierre Desrey/Des Rais/Desres, lived from ~1450-1520. He was a prose writer from Troyes, and produced many translations from Latin into French. In 1497, he played Christ in the Troyes Passion. He was also involved in the early book trade.

The role of the scholar is to translate words into images: Every scene has an explanatory octet (caption). Underlined phrases are in Latin; this is clearly a scholarly work.

The relationship between the taptestry and theatre was clear, especially with the use of the histoire, tabernacle (for framing/staging), and mistere.

1203-d: Spanish Medieval Silk: The Silk Trade in 14th-Century Spain, Nahum Ben-Yehuda, Bar-Ilan University.

The paper began by surveying rules of dress in Jewish law. There is a prohibition of mixing certain fibers in clothes used for clothing: flax (linen) and wool (only sheep's wool). This does not apply to carpets, cloths, upholstery, etc. Later rules become more stringent to avoid not only the mixture but also the appearance of mixture.

A late BC cannon mentions "shirayim" and "kalakh", and says that these should not be combined with flax or wool either. Maimonides later glossed these as a type of silk which can sometimes look soft like flax and sometimes hard like wool, so the prohibition against combining them with each other or with flax or wool was to prevent the appearance of the banned mixture.

In the 14th C, Rabbenu Asher fled Germany to Provence to Barcelona to Toledo, and said that it's actually ok to combine silk with flax or wool. The prohibition had been in place because the cloth was unfamiliar; but by the 14th C, this is no longer the case. Now it is common, and unlikely to be confused with either linen or wool.

What happened?? How can a post-Biblical, Rabbinic degree be rescinded?

(1) In Barcelona and Valencia, the Jews had the monopolies on silk. Asher's congregation were experts in the stuff.

(2) Types of silk: cultured silk/mulberry silk: 90% of what was used in Spain at the time. But in 3rd C Israel, what they had was "wild silk", which is ecru, or beige, or off-white, and looks a lot more like wool and linen than cultured silk does. So, the explanation is that the silk which was originally decreed was a different kind of silk.

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Do you recall if the vestments data included the assortment of albs held there? Was the speaker able to examine the vestments personally in detail? I'm using data from those albs in a paper I'm working on for next year's Kalamazoo and some additional details would be useful. (Of course, since the speaker is from Berkeley, maybe I should just contact her directly.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

And thanks to the wonders of e-mail, I have now contacted the author, posed my questions, and received a useful lead for at least a little more data.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

Hurrah! That's why I included affiliation along with name of speaker, to help with tracking down email address should anyone find that desirable.

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

I don't recognize the term 'alb' so I'm guessing they weren't discussed. I don't think she was able to view them in person; they are supposed to be going on display soon at the castle museum, but at the time she was doing her research things were delayed and I think they were still in storage. There was a recently-published book (earlier this year) that discussed the vestments in detail which was one of her primary sources.

[bend-gules.livejournal.com]

I'm so desperately jealous of all the textile sessions! the prostitutes one mentioned prev especially!

[aryanhwy.livejournal.com]

So...what would it take to get you to Leeds next year? I'm organizing at least one session, maybe more if I can get enough speakers. Right now I've got two papers (a session is usually three, sometimes four) lined up on prostitution in the 16th C (still looking for a snappy title connecting the topic with pleasure...maybe Prostitution: Power and Pleasure), a paper by me on names of courtesans in early 16th C Rome, and a paper by someone in Northshield on "Dangerous Women of the Reformation: Prostitution imagery and the Power of Women Theme in German Renaissance Prints", and I'm hoping to collect more proposals from others.

The DISTAFF sessions are always lots of fun, and well-attended.