During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Lollard preacher John Ball rhetorically asked:
When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?1
In Ball’s context, this text primarily references social rank rather than gender, but it also represents medieval ideas on the division of work based on gender, a division, moreover, understood as biblically sanctioned and representing the natural order of the things since the Fall of Man. Common medieval iconography of the post-lapsarian Adam and Eve shows them labouring, as in the illumination from the twelfth-century Hunterian Psalter in Figure 4.1.2 Adam is shown tilling the soil while Eve works with a distaff and spindle to produce thread. However, the issue of gender and textile production in the Middle Ages is a complex one and the dichotomy suggested by Ball’s lines does not accurately represent the realities of medieval textile work. Certainly, medieval women engaged in spinning and other forms of textile production, but there is also abundant evidence that men too engaged in many forms of textile work and that the gendering of medieval textile production is both multi-faceted and dynamic.
This chapter aims to raise two broad questions: how was medieval textile production gendered, in specific times and places, and what are the factors which govern this gendering? It will consider how different sorts of evidence might provide information about the ways in which medieval textile production was practised and viewed in the Middle Ages, while acknowledging that the answers to these questions can be difficult to determine. Such questions include: were different sorts of textiles made by men and by women, or were different aspects of textile-making processes gendered differently? Were there gender differences between domestic and commercial textile production? How did position in the social order intersect with gender in the field of textile work? What factors governed the ways that textile production was gendered? What ideological bases were there for the divisions of labour in textile production?
This chapter will not attempt to provide definitive answers to these questions. It is important to acknowledge that there will always be differences in the circumstances governing how textile production was gendered in particular instances, but this chapter aims to highlight a range of approaches to this complex field, including some new avenues for further research. It will also make a case for the importance of interdisciplinarity in textile history. Clearly, the task of considering the evidence for gender and textile production across the whole of Europe for the length of the Middle Ages is far beyond the scope of this chapter, so this study is limited to presenting some cross-disciplinary case studies from England and France, from the mid- to late Middle Ages, which might serve as examples to illuminate the field. The term ‘work’ is used here expansively to encompass all aspects of textile production, from the processing of raw materials to the embellishment of luxury textiles, regardless of whether the worker was paid for their labour, or whether they made textiles as part of a domestic or gift economy. This approach acknowledges that all textile production required time, effort, skill and resources, and that, whatever their purpose or status, textiles and their making were an integral part of medieval society and culture.
Historiography and methodology
A considerable literature on gender and textile production exists, most of it primarily focused on women rather than men, produced by scholars from a range of disciplinary fields.3 Analysis of women’s involvement in textile production has focused variously on their participation in professional guilds, their role as artists in producing decorative work, and their contribution to households or the Church. This literature largely reflects disciplinary concerns. Research by economic historians has focused on the documentary records of particular towns and guilds, and the differences between rural and urban economies, as well as providing broader overviews of the roles of women in the textile industry;4 literary scholars have discussed the representations of women’s textile work in romantic, didactic, and other literary texts;5 archaeologists have focused on textile tools in the context of burials and gendered spaces;6 art historians have considered women’s part in producing decorative textiles,7 particularly embroidery, and, to a lesser extent, the depictions of women and men making textiles.8 A smaller body of work has considered the metaphysical and ideological aspects of textile production.9 Many of these studies are narrowly focused, looking at a particular set of records or texts and, more rarely, individual textile works or workers, whereas more wide-ranging discussions of medieval textile production often occur only within the context of broader histories of textiles or considerations of the status of women in the Middle Ages.
This body of research on medieval textiles provides a basis for asking broader questions about the ways in which medieval textile work was gendered. While there remains a great deal of fine-grained work on this topic to be done within disciplines, there is also a need to synthesise findings across disciplinary boundaries in order to develop a more comprehensive picture of women’s and men’s textile work and the role that gender played in influencing medieval attitudes and practice. It is also necessary to examine critically the different forms of evidence for the types and circumstances of medieval textile production, and to consider how various media of representation—and the disciplinary traditions of interpreting them—affect our understanding of the medieval ideas of gender they present.
There are, of course, significant difficulties in attempting to synthesise a large body of research across not only disciplinary boundaries, but also across the vast geographical and temporal stretches of medieval Europe. There are enormous differences between, for example, the circumstances of an eighth-century domestic weaver using a warp-weighted loom in Scandinavia, and a fifteenth-century professional dyer in a workshop in Italy, and little that can be gained from making direct comparisons between them. However, looking at a long and geographically broad sweep of medieval European textile history has the potential to identify patterns of how textile production and the factors which influenced it were gendered, and so facilitate the development of theoretical approaches. Such patterns might include whether particular crafts are consistently gendered in different places or times, whether technological change affected the gendering of aspects of production, or whether the relative legal and economic status of men and women affected the types of textiles they produced.
It must also be stated that there is a great deal that we simply do not know about textile history, where we are limited by the paucity of the record, whether documentary, literary, archaeological, or visual. We know, for example, relatively little about the gendered production of textiles outside of the towns and in domestic settings, compared to the records of urban commercial production, and much less about unpaid than paid textile work; these absences can skew the picture. We have, as it were, a series of dots left by records from particular towns, discrete archaeological finds, and the depiction of particular social groups and certain kinds of textile workers in art made for the elite. All of this evidence provides valuable information, which needs to be interpreted by appropriate specialists, but it is also the role of the textile historian to attempt to join these dots, while acknowledging that some of the dots are not present.
In addition to the usual problems encountered when dealing with medieval sources, particularly their uneven survival and the under-representation of women in documentary records, there is also a need to sift through the historical layers of assumption that have accreted to the field of gender and textile production, and to separate modern and medieval ideologies about gender and work from the lived experience of medieval textile makers. That certain ideologies have had an ongoing impact on ideas of gender and textile production in the Middle Ages, sometimes on the basis of very little evidence, has been illustrated by Rozsika Parker in her influential book The Subversive Stitch.10 Parker charts the Victorian process of myth making, in which the history of medieval embroidery was heavily influenced by Victorian ideals of femininity, which cast it as either professional work which was gendered male, or as a female pastime which was both domestic and elite. In countering this ideology, Parker sought to frame medieval women’s embroidery as both professional work and a site of female creativity to be celebrated alongside men’s art and scholarship. But ‘reclaiming’ embroidery as women’s work can also distort the picture. Parker’s argument that some of the women listed in accounts as suppliers of embroidery were embroiderers rather than merchants sits uneasily against her assertion that men similarly listed were merchants rather than embroiderers, and her claims that some women were professional embroiderers are in some cases overstated.11
There is often little or no evidence to support prevalent assumptions that the makers of textiles were female. Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz has pointed out, for example, that despite the long-held belief that the Bayeux Tapestry was embroidered by women, the gender of its makers remains unknown.12 Documentary sources identify male professional embroiderers in medieval London and Paris, indicating that men as well as women practised this craft professionally.13 Similarly, spinning has been framed as an ‘exclusively female’ pursuit, an assertion which has frequently been repeated, but which does not always hold true.14 Archaeologists have traditionally interpreted finds of textile tools in burials and other spaces as conclusive evidence of a female presence, to the extent that there is a risk of producing a circular argument which reinforces the idea that only women used textile tools.15 In order to understand the nature of gendered textile production in the Middle Ages, it is necessary to pay attention to the work of men as well as women, and to consider the ways in which male and female textile work interacted.
Sources for textile history and problems of interpretation
An interdisciplinary approach to textile history allows us to consider a broad range of evidence for the experiences of medieval men and women in textile production. However, an understanding of how diverse forms of evidence shape the information they convey is crucial to their analysis. In particular, when dealing with sources in which the communication of information about gender is not their primary aim, a critical siting of each source in its historical and cultural context is fundamental to understanding both the limitations and the value of the evidence it presents. The following sections provide examples of the possibilities and constraints of evidence in different media, and the way that using multiple, diverse sources can build a complex and nuanced picture.
Civic records
A collection of thirteenth-century Parisian guild statutes, published as the Livre des métiers (Book of Crafts),16 together with the tax rolls from late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Paris provide detailed sources of information about gender and occupation in the medieval textile and other industries. The Livre des métiers was compiled by the Royal Provost of France, Etienne Boileau, between 1266 and 1272. The tax assessments in the rolls cover the years from 1292 to 1313, with the exception of the period from 1293 to 1295.17 Both sets of records have been used extensively by scholars. Janet Archer, in her doctoral thesis, used the Livre des métiers and the tax rolls to examine the role of women in the Parisian economy in the late thirteenth century, across all of the trades in which they worked.18 Sharon Farmer has used the same records to assess the various Parisian silk industries, including considerations of gender.19
Archer has presented in detail the problems and limitations of these documents as sources of information about gender in textile production.20 Principal among them is that these records do not include the work of married women, who remain invisible to the record, or the work of artisans not organised in métiers.21 Similarly, the tax rolls are limited to lists of the heads of taxpaying households, who were predominantly male, and Farmer has estimated that around 75 per cent of artisans were not taxed.22 The tax rolls too, therefore, significantly underestimate the contribution of women. This under-representation means that the absence or low numbers of women textile workers in records for particular métiers does not necessarily indicate that women did not perform these crafts, but rather that their work has not been documented. Conversely, however, in those cases where women dominated a particular métier, or it is listed as exclusively female, we can be more confident that the men in that craft are not under-represented. Of the forty-one textile crafts that Archer identifies from the records, sixteen list solely women members, while a further five show more female than male members.23 Women dominated the various kinds of spinning in particular, and crafts involving silk.24 Of the textile crafts in which only men are listed, many list only a small number of members, and given that women are under-represented in the records, it is possible that men did not actually outnumber women in these crafts at all, or in those crafts where the numbers of men and women were more evenly balanced. Only in a few of the textile crafts, notably the cloth weavers, the tapestry weavers, the fullers, and the dyers, are the differences in numbers so large as to be indicative of genuine male dominance.25
Visual evidence
The limitations of documentary evidence for the role of women in textile production in the Middle Ages, much of which derives from the financial and legal record, can be mitigated by comparing and correlating this data with the representations of textile production in visual, literary, and other sources. Visual depictions of textile production can offer valuable contemporary, albeit frequently idealised, representations of women and men undertaking textile work, such as the sculptures of women preparing fibre on the north portal of Chartres Cathedral,26 or the images illustrating the fifteenth-century Trattato dell’Arte della Seta, a handbook for silk manufacturers.27 However, as historical sources, these visual sources need to be examined critically, particularly with regard to the context in which they were produced and used, and the extent to which they portray the conditions of actual, contemporary textile production. As Ilja Veldman has noted in her discussion of postmedieval art, ‘just as in literature, a great many themes are rooted in tradition or based on topoi, which often reduces the usefulness of the arts as historical source material’.28 Gerhard Jaritz has similarly pointed out that medieval depictions of work are frequently idealised.29
Medieval images of textile work are often reproduced in studies of medieval women and of textile history as generic examples, without due regard for context. The illumination on folio 263 of the twelfth-century English Eadwine Psalter, reproduced as the cover of David Herlihy’s book Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe, provides an example.30 It depicts four women grouped within and around an open-walled structure. To the right are several sheep, and a shepherd sitting on a hill nearby blows a horn. One of the women to the left of the structure holds out long hanks of warp threads on a stick; another standing next to her grasps a large pair of shears. Under the structure, one woman is kneeling beside a vertical loom, while another stands next to it, also holding a large pair of shears. Herlihy captions this image ‘Women shearing sheep, spinning and weaving’ and interprets it, and the image in the ninth-century Carolingian Utrecht Psalter from which it is copied, as evidence that such medieval textile work was both gendered female and that the women carrying it out worked outside under specially constructed structures.31 Despite the caption, it is clear that the women depicted are neither spinning nor shearing sheep, but rather are concerned with the weaving of cloth on a vertical loom.32 The rationale underlying the composition of the image becomes clearer when we recognise that it was not intended to be primarily a depiction of contemporary textile practice, but rather of the Old Testament passage dealing with the lamentation of Hezekiah: ‘Like a shepherd’s tent my house has been pulled down and taken from me. Like a weaver I have rolled up my life, and he has cut me off from the loom.’33 While the image of the weavers must have been one familiar enough to the medieval audience to be recognisable, it cannot automatically be interpreted as an accurate depiction of textile practices in either twelfth-century England or the ninth-century Carolingian Empire. Nonetheless, the depictions of weaving in both the Eadwine and Utrecht Psalters provide useful indications that the audiences for these works would have understood that weaving was gendered female, and that women could be expected to use a vertical, probably warp-weighted loom to produce it.
Visual evidence may also be useful tracking shifts in technology and medieval understanding of the gendering of textile work. The Reiner Musterbuch, an artist’s model book made between around 1200 and 1220, probably in the Cistercian monastery of Rein, near Graz, shows both a man and a woman weaving (Figure 4.2). A second male figure, holding a shuttle and reed, appears in the upper spandrel, perhaps representing God, in a role as a creator or weaver of the world.34 It is significant that the woman on the left uses the vertical warp-weighted loom, but the man on the right weaves using what appears to be a treadle-operated floor loom. This image suggests that men as well as women could be weavers, and that there might have been differences in the equipment that they used.35 It is around this time that the horizontal loom began to replace vertical looms, but there is debate as to whether this explains why men apparently began to replace women as weavers in a commercial context at this time.36 While there are numerous images of women using horizontal looms in medieval iconography, the majority of these are depictions of biblical and mythological figures, such as Naamah, Penelope, and Minerva. In contrast, those images which show contemporary weavers using horizontal looms, such as those in the Nürnberger Hausbuch of Karl Mendel, which portrays members of the craft guilds in Nuremberg, depict these weavers as men.37 The images of women weaving on horizontal looms, therefore, cannot be considered as evidence that medieval women actually used such looms.
Literary sources
Literary texts similarly provide valuable information about the nature of gendered textile production in the Middle Ages, but also require critical reading. E. Jane Burns notes in the introduction to her book on women’s silk work in medieval Europe that there are significant differences between the picture of women’s work provided by documentary evidence and that depicted in French literature.38 While documentary sources such as the Livre des métiers provide evidence of ordinary women earning or supplementing their livings from textile production, often alongside men in domestic or commercial settings, literary documents tend to depict mostly elite women’s textile production. In one respect this reflects the work that such elite women are described as having produced in inventories, hagiographies, and chronicles, particularly in the many examples of gifts for the Church, especially of needlework, ‘made by her own hand’.39 The range of textile production portrayed in romance literature is similarly limited, offering a narrower view of the extent of women’s activities when compared to evidence of historical female textile producers of the lower orders. In literature, elite women frequently embroider and spin, almost always using silk, but do little else. They are not generally portrayed carding wool, hackling flax, weaving cloth or dyeing, or any of the more strenuous aspects of textile production. The imprisoned noble women in Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain and its English version Ywain and Gawain, as described by Stephanie Trigg, produce decorative work rather than large-scale utilitarian textiles.40 E. Jane Burns’ chapter in this volume explores the differences between literary depictions of textile work as a pastime and as a professional craft, challenging traditional readings of women textile workers in the French chansons de toile as solely elite. She argues that the broader range of work these women are depicted as undertaking, including sewing, spinning, cutting, and tailoring, marks them as being lower-class, professional textile workers.
Medieval art and literature cannot be understood as transparent representations of the realities of textile production, and they require careful interpretation, particularly regarding the way they use iconographical forms or literary tropes. Perhaps more importantly, they may represent and reproduce contemporary gendered assumptions about textile work and its social status, providing valuable insights into the attitudes which themselves shaped medieval practice.
Lexical evidence
As well as documentary, visual, and literary sources, lexical evidence can also provide an insight into the changing relationships between gender and textile production. Focusing on Middle English, for instance, the suffix -ster, deriving from Old English -estre, was used to indicate a female version of a descriptive noun for an occupation.41 There are many occupations that record both female and male variants, for example, baker and baxter, webbe and webster; many of these survive as modern surnames. Examining the relationship between the terms for male and female variants of textile occupations can provide insight into how the gendered nature of the crafts themselves changed over time.42 The most obvious example of a female occupational term is spinster, attested from 1362 and simply denoting a female spinner in Middle English. The term spinner was also used, from c. 1450, but in this instance denoted women rather than men, suggesting that men as professional spinners were so rare that they did not need a specific term. The late date of the first attestation of spinner, compared to a date of 725 for the verb to spin, is perhaps an indicator that while the work of spinning was certainly common, the idea that someone should use the term to identify their occupation was relatively unusual. Similarly, the term throwster, attested from 1455, denoting a woman who twists silk fibres into thread, and kempster, one who combs fibres for spinning, have no male equivalent.43
In a number of cases, the female variant of a textile occupation came to be used over time for male practitioners of the trade as well. The word webster, recorded from 1100 to denote a female weaver and still current in 1300,44 was used by William Langland in 1362 to denote a male weaver, despite the fact that webbe had been used for male weavers from c. 1100, and continued to be used in this way into the fifteenth century. The term dyer is recorded from 1369, in an instance clearly denoting a male, but dyester appears from 1350 in a context which does not specify a gender. From 1497, however, dyester is clearly used for male dyers. Such examples suggest that a type of textile production, which may have started out as exclusively or predominantly female, became mixed or male-dominated over time.
Other occupational terms are not recorded in the feminine form. The term fuller appears from c. 1000, but there is no fullster, which might suggest that it was rare for English women to practise the craft of fulling. In contrast, carder, appearing only from c. 1450 and meaning someone who cards wool, is glossed with the Latin feminine term carpetrix, suggesting that it remained a female profession, perhaps overtaking the earlier term kempster. The Anglo-Norman-derived tailor, first attested in 1297, has no direct female equivalent, but may have been borrowed to fill a lexical need to differentiate this male occupation from that of the seamster, recorded from c. 995 but which by c. 1000 could also apply to a man, suggesting that by the thirteenth century there was a perceived difference in the nature of women’s and men’s work of this type.
The lexical evidence for gender in textile production is, at present, too sparse to be conclusive, but textile terminology is an area of lexicography in which there is room for further research. It is likely that as more Middle English texts, especially those of a legal or commercial nature, are published, that earlier dates of first recorded usage and variant citations will be found for some of these terms for textile workers, thus further refining the picture they project of medieval gender relationships in this field. Nonetheless, a broad pattern emerges in which some terms for textile workers originally denoting women were gradually expanded to encompass both men and women, while others remained exclusively female, most notably terms for carders and combers, spinners and silk workers. Even when the lexical forms do not signal female gender, it seems that some crafts were understood to be gendered female. The English Parliament Rolls for 1450 record a petition to King Henry VI on the part of aggrieved textile workers which records precisely this gender division: ‘As yet no redress has been made, to the most intolerable harm of all the commons of this realm … many cloth makers, that is to say male weavers, fullers and dyers. And female combers, carders and spinners’.45 There is room for further research to assess whether there might be correlations between lexical changes and the social changes which saw shifts over time in the way that certain textile crafts were gendered.
Material and social influences shaping gender and textile work
The variety of documentary, visual, literary, and lexical records allows for an analysis of the material, social, and cultural conditions which shaped the gendering of textile work, and for comparison across areas traditionally considered from different disciplinary traditions. It is significant that the division of labour in textile production indicated by the English lexical evidence echoes broadly that indicated by the French Livre des métiers. Spinning and the associated fibre preparation were predominantly undertaken by women, while the work of producing and finishing cloth, including weaving, fulling, and dyeing, was mostly performed by men. It is important to note, however, that the divisions are not entirely clear cut, and there are women and men who worked in industries where their gender was a minority.46 Nonetheless, this is a significant pattern in the gendering of medieval textile production which requires explanation.
Earlier scholars suggested that physical strength may have precluded women from the more strenuous crafts, but more recently scholars have been reluctant to accept this as the only reason.47 The Livre des métiers shows that some women worked as butchers, metal workers, and carpenters, occupations which might have been considered physically arduous, and that men worked as embroiderers and the makers of various dress accessories, tasks which required finer manual skills.48 Visual images also depict medieval women undertaking flax breaking, crop harvesting, and laundry, tasks which required considerable strength.49 Archer comments that if women are spinning on larger spindles than men, it ‘goes against the common wisdom that women were usually involved in small fine work, presumably because of the size of their hands’.50
Other explanations have been provided for the tendency for specific textile professions to be gendered as either male or female. Drawing on Judith Brown’s observations about the historical need for women’s work to be compatible with breastfeeding and childcare, Elizabeth Barber theorises that this is the reason why most textile production has been performed by women since prehistoric times. Work which is compatible with childcare must be able to be easily interrupted and easily resumed and must not pose a hazard to the child. Ideally it should be carried out in the home.51 Barber’s theory does not necessarily apply to every instance of later medieval textile production, when, from the twelfth century onwards, the rise of urbanisation meant that many textiles were produced commercially and in larger quantities, but it does provide an explanation for the traditional gendering of certain aspects of textile production as male or female. Moreover, it must be remembered that a large proportion of medieval textiles, including those produced professionally, were still made in whole or in part in a domestic environment.52
Certain types of textile work do admirably satisfy Barber’s criteria. Highest on the list is spinning. This, when done with a spindle as opposed to a wheel, was highly portable, and in the hands of a skilled practitioner required very little concentration. It is likely that up to five hours of carding, combing, and spinning were needed for each hour of weaving. Therefore, in order to keep weavers operating productively, women, whose days consisted of other tasks, could profitably use spare moments in the day to spin, either to supply their household needs or to sell the products.53 The image of Eve in Figure 4.1 combining spinning and childcare illustrates the potential for multi-tasking possible with spinning, as do many other medieval images such as the woman feeding chickens with her distaff tucked under her arm in the Luttrell Psalter.54 Other textile work which similarly satisfied the criteria of being intermittent and safe included carding or combing wool for spinning, some kinds of weaving (although setting up the warp threads for a piece of cloth is a task which requires a reasonable degree of concentration and is best not interrupted), embroidery and, once it was introduced to Europe in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, hand knitting. Knitting is one of the few medieval textile techniques where raw fibre can be processed into finished garment using entirely portable, simple equipment, making it ideal for a home-based industry.
Some aspects of textile processing are, however, much less suitable for intermittent, home-based activity of the sort compatible with childcare. Commercial cloth dyeing, for instance, used poisonous dyes and mordants, and large vats of boiling dye-stuffs. An illustration from a fifteenth-century Flemish manuscript of the Liber de natura rerum depicts male dyers working in a dedicated workshop space, using a large, purpose-built dyebath and manipulating the heavy bolts of cloths with poles (Figure 4.3).55 While medieval women did undertake dyeing in the home, it is likely that their domestic work was limited to dyeing yarn rather than cloth, or to smaller yardages of cloth for domestic use, allowing for a process which could be much more easily contained and controlled.56 Other aspects of textile production which follow the same pattern include the fulling of wool; that is, partly felting the finished cloth by trampling it in hot water with urine or fuller’s earth to produce a denser cloth. While this can also be undertaken in small quantities in the home, the Livre des métiers does not record any women working in this industry. Fulling was also mechanised from the twelfth century, with water-powered mills replacing the heavy labour, but requiring capital investment and dedicated space and equipment.57
The pattern of work whereby women engaged in ‘by-industries’ is a common one in the Middle Ages across different fields of endeavour. Judith Bennett defined a by-industry as ‘productive work carried out in the home as one of many employments, not a sole occupation’.58 However, not all women’s textile work was necessarily a by-industry. The records of the Livre des métiers show that women worked formally in many of the same textile crafts as men, earning a living, paying taxes, and taking apprentices, and that men also engaged in some of the crafts which might have been performed as by-industries, even if they apparently did so in smaller numbers. The Livre des métiers also lists a large number of male ouvriers and female ouvrières belonging to various crafts. Archer interprets these as pieceworkers, working in their homes, using raw materials supplied by others.59 In the textile crafts, there are far more women than men in these categories, and it is likely that many of them were spinners or throwsters.60 Using the tax rolls, Farmer calculates that there were 159 female silk throwsters, including sixty-six ouvrières, active in late thirteenth-century Paris, but no men. In addition, she identified eight female gold spinners but no male equivalents.61 The lower numbers of men recorded working as ouvriers in the textile industries may mean that this form of work was exceptional, perhaps performed only by men who had particular reasons for working in less demanding jobs, such as age or infirmity.
A broad pattern can be discerned in which women’s textile production in the Middle Ages appears more likely to have been based within the household than that of men, notwithstanding the invisibility of women in male-dominated workshops. However, we should look beyond the needs of childcare to explain the gendered division of textile labour, particularly in later medieval cities. Jane Whittle observes that throughout the Middle Ages the vast majority of people lived in rural rather than urban areas.62 The available documentary evidence, however, indicates that it was in the cities and towns that men increasingly became involved in textile production, and that the majority of their work was of a commercial rather than domestic nature.63 That the majority of surviving medieval documents concerning textile production derive from urban environments necessarily skews the evidence towards this conclusion, but since the cities also concentrated the markets for professional textile production, it is likely that this pattern did indeed apply. The economics of textile production, particularly in the medieval cities, might therefore have had a significant effect on how textile labour was gendered.
Economic influences shaping gender and textile work
Archer suggests that the more lucrative textile trades were performed more by men than women. She notes that in the Parisian records, it appears that spinning with a large spindle was done only by women, while both men and women used the small spindle. In attempting to explain the spinning that men did undertake, she speculates that: ‘If the small spindle produced a tighter thread, cloth made from this thread was more valuable. Thus it may be that artisans in this speciality could expect to be paid more than those who used the large spindle.’64 John Munro states, however, that the larger, heavier drop spindles were used for spinning linen and worsted yarns, while the lighter and smaller ones were used for cheaper woollen and cotton yarns. If this is the distinction meant in the Livre des métiers, it would suggest that spinning on larger spindles was the better-paid occupation.65 It is true, however, that women in the Middle Ages were generally poorer than men, especially if they were single or widowed, and that their work was less financially rewarding.66 It is likely, then, that Archer is correct in concluding that the textile work undertaken by women was probably more poorly remunerated, although the levels of pay for different tasks do not themselves explain why such tasks were gendered male or female.
Another factor in the gendering of textile production is that women were less likely than men to own the materials with which they worked. The regulations of the large-spindle silk spinners specifically prevent spinners from pawning the silk with which they had been entrusted, something that Archer claims is ‘common with many métiers in which women are prominent’.67 This suggests that women were more likely to have worked on commission, presumably paid by the weight of thread they produced, making them effectively outworkers rather than business owners, and less able to make a profit by marking up the cost of the materials. It also suggests that they may have found this a financially precarious way to make a living, requiring them to pawn the raw fibre as a way of making ends meet until they were paid for their work. If women’s ability to undertake textile work was dependent on their capacity to afford raw materials, particularly more expensive ones like silk, then this was likely to have been a limiting factor in the kinds of work they were able to choose.
Archer notes an anomaly in the regulations of silk weavers with regard to gender in medieval Paris: the mestier des tissuz de soie (craft of silk textiles) has exclusively female membership apart from the inspectors, whereas the ouvriers de draps de soie (craft of silk cloth) are all masculine. Archer notes that the right to practise the latter craft had to be purchased from the king.68 The difference between tissuz and draps suggests that the distinction may well have been on the size of the cloth produced. Drap is generally used to indicate a length of cloth,69 whereas tissu may refer to smaller types of woven cloth, including those later described as ‘narrow wares’. Chrétien de Troyes uses the term tissu to describe such a belt or girdle:
(At the waist a finely woven belt
Whose buckle and trimmings were of gold.)70
The term ‘narrow wares’, as the name suggests, encompassed decorative weaving for trims and cords. Narrow wares represented a different kind of weaving to the large lengths of cloth woven on floor or upright looms, since they were produced on small, rigid-heddle or box looms, or by tablet weaving or finger-loop braiding.71 In medieval England, too, the makers of such narrow wares were predominantly female. Women petitioned parliament to protect them from imported goods under the title of the ‘sylkewymmen and Throwestres’ in 1455, although they did not form an organised guild until much later than the Parisian makers of tissuz de soie.72 The predominance of women in the narrow wares silk industry may have reflected their lower economic power as the amount of silk required to make a girdle or braid is far less than that required to make a length of cloth. Further, the amount of time required to make these smaller objects would have resulted in faster turnaround and required lower capital investment, regardless of whether the makers paid for the materials themselves, or were provided with them by third parties commissioning the work. It is likely, however, that this would also have resulted in lower income.
The cost of the equipment was likely to have been as significant a factor as the cost of the raw materials in shaping how that particular aspect of textile production was gendered. While a small rigid-heddle or box loom, or a set of weaving tablets, on the one hand might be made or purchased cheaply and allow for the production of small, luxury textiles as a by-industry, a large floor loom represented an enormous outlay, which would have required more sustained dedicated labour in order to recoup its costs. As well as making large-scale cloth production unsuitable for a domestically-based by-industry, particularly in the case of the broadloom, the consistently lower socio-economic status of women in the Middle Ages is likely to have limited their access to this means of production. This is not to say that women did not work as weavers using larger looms, either domestically or commercially, but that the type of weaving they did might have been dependent on the kinds of loom they could afford, or that they were employed to work on looms owned by others rather than being in business for themselves.73
Issues of space and place of work also had an impact on gender and the textile worker’s relationship to their means of employment. Given that women’s textile production was more likely to be domestic and undertaken as a by-industry, the equipment used for it tended to be portable and take up less dedicated space in comparison to men’s commercial production. Such limitations may explain the gender divisions in weaving depicted in the Reiner Musterbuch image, discussed above (Figure 4.2). The upright warp-weighted loom traditionally associated with women’s domestic weaving was a much less sophisticated and expensive piece of equipment than the horizontal floor loom. It would also have required much less space to operate, and could easily be moved and stored against a wall. However, producing cloth on the warp-weighted loom, or the other vertical, two-beam loom was slower, more labour intensive, and the length of the cloth was limited in comparison to the horizontal loom. The cloth produced on an upright loom was therefore more likely to be suitable for domestic than commercial purposes, although it is likely that women also sold or traded some of the finished cloth and so engaged in a transactional economy in this way.
Another significant technological advance in textile production in the Middle Ages was the spinning wheel, believed to have been introduced to western Europe in the later twelfth or early thirteenth centuries for cotton, and in the later thirteenth and fourteenth century in the form of the great wheel for wool.74 The spinning wheel allowed thread to be spun at twice the rate of the drop spindle, but, like the horizontal loom, it required capital expenditure and more dedicated space than its predecessor. This might suggest that spinning on a wheel was likely to have been the preserve of men rather than women, but there is little direct evidence to support this, and only very few medieval images of men using a spinning wheel.75 This might be explained by the fact that the spinning wheel was initially only partially successful. The thread produced on it was weaker than thread produced on a drop spindle, and was therefore only suitable for weft threads. As a result, a division occurred between those who used the drop spindle and the wheel, with the former commanding a higher price. It was not until the late fifteenth century that the more efficient Saxony wheel, which overcame these problems, began to be more widely used.76
Since making narrow wares and spinning, as well as other crafts such as embroidery, allowed women to work in the home and produce luxury or high-quality goods without having to rely on establishment capital to purchase materials or equipment, the cost of setting up either a formal or informal business could be much less than that required for a dedicated workshop or larger-scale business. Whether a particular textile craft was gendered male or female, therefore, was likely to have depended more on the ability of women to pay for raw materials and equipment and to command dedicated space and time, than on their small hands and ‘longe fyngres’.77
Researchers investigating the status of women’s work in late medieval towns have generally agreed that women were for the most part systematically disadvantaged by the guild systems which excluded them or limited their involvement, and by the patriarchal nature of the household as the base for production.78 This disadvantage was not absolute, however, and there are examples of exclusively female guilds, such as the linen drapers in Rouen, which managed to wield considerable wealth and power,79 as well as the widespread practice of allowing widows of masters in various crafts to continue to run their husbands’ workshops and practise their trades. Even when women could not be guild members, and were therefore less visible in the records, this does not mean that they did not practise textile crafts commercially, although their economic power was almost certainly less than that of their husbands or families. As Kathryn Reyerson has noted, women’s experiences around work have varied greatly, according to time and place, and there remains considerable scholarly debate about the extent of the disadvantage they suffered.80 There is also a need for further research comparing the status of women in different textile industries to those in other crafts. In general, however, and notwithstanding some important exceptions, the lower socio-economic situation of medieval women in comparison to men is likely to have limited their access to space, equipment, and raw materials. Lack of guild membership, and the access to more profitable markets that such membership allowed, also would have cemented the lower-status of female textile workers, restricted their choices, and thereby shaped the gendered nature of medieval textile production.
Ideology and iconography
While pragmatic and material conditions significantly shaped the ways in which medieval textile production was gendered, ideological factors also contributed to how medieval ideas of gender influenced women’s and men’s involvement in this industry. If we return to the medieval iconography of the post-lapsarian Eve, it is important to note that there is no biblical source for her spinning. In the account of the Fall in Genesis God condemns Adam to work the ground and Eve to bear children in sorrow, but there is no mention of Eve’s work beyond the implicit childrearing. Both Adam and Eve are depicted as making their clothes from fig leaves once they comprehend their nakedness, and it is God who fashions clothing from skins for them to wear after their expulsion from Eden.81 Eve spins in medieval iconography, not because God has ordained that she should, but because she has been fashioned in the image of the ideal medieval woman.
It is the description of the ideal wife in Proverbs 31 which reinforces the idea of textile production as appropriate for women in both medieval Jewish and Christian tradition.
[The] wife of noble character, worth far more than rubies … selects wool and flax and works with eager hands … In her hand she holds the distaff and grasps the spindle with her fingers … When it snows, she has no fear for her household; for all of them are clothed in scarlet. She makes coverings for her bed; she is clothed in fine linen and purple. … She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes.82
Significantly, the woman in Proverbs 31 produces textiles both for domestic and commercial use. However, the ideal of femininity in medieval Christendom was not Eve, but the Virgin Mary, and in medieval iconography she takes on both the virtues and the textile work of the woman in Proverbs. Like Eve, Mary is frequently depicted spinning, including at the Annunciation.83 While there is no canonical biblical description of her doing so, much of the iconography is based on description in the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, in which Mary spins thread for the temple veil. The Virgin is also frequently depicted undertaking other forms of textile work such as embroidering, weaving, and knitting, although again there is no biblical text on which such imagery is based.84 In these images, the Virgin’s textile work generally takes place within a domestic interior, and on a small scale. While there are numerous images of the Virgin weaving, in these she is most frequently depicted producing narrow wares, using tablets or a small box loom (Figure 4.4). In the much rarer examples where she is depicted weaving cloth, she is shown using a vertical loom.85 The textile work of the ideal woman, therefore, was presented as being exactly along the lines of medieval women’s production: principally small-scale and domestic. While these images undoubtedly reflect the realities of the societies in which they were made, they also served to reinforce the prevailing gender distribution of textile work, and invest the demarcation between men’s and women’s textile production with the highest moral authority.
This ideal of womanhood expressed through textile production was, however, one which could be subverted. There are numerous medieval images which depict women beating men with distaffs, as a trope of the destructive power of women, or of the world turned upside down, wherein the distaff, a symbol of morally appropriate femininity, becomes a weapon.86 These images reverse an order widely understood as an ideal, even if it is an ideal which exists in tension with the realities of medieval textile production. The presence of many of such images in manuscript marginalia might suggest that they were intended to be humorous, although they might also be read as commentary or warning.87 The fifteenth-century woodcut by Israhel van Meckenem, known as ‘The Quarrelsome Couple’ (c. 1465–1500) shows not only a woman threatening a man with her distaff, but the male figure meekly winding spun yarn on to a niddy-noddy (Figure 4.5).88 To reinforce that this composition contravenes the natural order, the woman is depicted putting on a pair of underpants, an exclusively male garment. The message is clear that spinning and the associated task of winding yarn are proper activities for women, whereas men who undertake them are emasculated.
A series of images in the lower margin of folios 138 to 148 of the Smithfield Decretals, illuminated in fourteenth-century London, depict men and women engaged in textile production and other work. These images ostensibly form a narrative sequence with folio 139 (Figure 4.6) showing a man apparently leading a woman away from her work at the spinning wheel; folio 147 (Figure 4.7) showing the same woman spinning at the wheel, while the man cards wool; and the following image, folio 147 verso (Figure 4.8) showing the man using the wheel to spin.89 The marginal context for this image suggests that it was not intended to represent a straightforward depiction of male spinning. Andrew Taylor has described the illuminations of the Smithfield Decretals as depicting scenes of ‘carnivalesque revelry’, which function ‘as a site of resistance’ to the authority of the text which they accompany.90 Yet we know from the Livre des métiers that men did spin professionally. Clearly, the context in which the textile work is represented was as important for the way it was gendered as the nature of the work itself.
Even when spinning was appropriately undertaken by women, it could have negative connotations. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath states in her prologue that ‘Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng, God have yive / to wommen kyndely’, suggesting that spinning is considered a natural property of women, but that like weeping and deceitfulness, it is an indication of weakness.91 Christine de Pizan in the Book of the City of Ladies presents a view of spinning as the societal norm for girls, even as she decries it:
It was because your mother, as a woman, held the view that you should spend your time spinning like the other girls, that you did not receive a more advanced or detailed initiation into the sciences.92
While textile work and learning are each endowed with moral value, here they are juxtaposed as inimical to one another. However, Christine also attributes the invention of cloth making to the goddesses Minerva andArachne, placing textile work securely in the female domain. She defends this ‘woman’s work’ against criticism: ‘These techniques have all benefited humankind enormously, despite the fact that some men scorn women for performing such activities.’93 Noah’s wife in the Wakefield Cycle enacts a type of female disobedience when she refuses to board the Ark because she is busy with her spinning. Catherine Batt has outlined a range of negative representations of spinning in medieval literature, particularly in what she terms ‘regulatory fiction’ and the inherent misogyny in many of these treatments.94 Advising women to limit themselves to their spinning rather than engage in debate was a trope for silencing women who were vocal or unorthodox, and it is worth remembering the predominance of male voices in medieval didactic literature and the written record more generally. Even in a religious context, women’s textile production could be morally ambiguous. While making textiles, particularly embroidery, fulfilled the requirement for nuns to work, it was also a subject of concern that they did not become overly attentive to their needlework at the expense of their prayer.95 Textile production therefore sat in an uneasy morally gendered space, approved of as a practice because it was necessary and because it was the proper work for women, but conversely disapproved of because it could be a cause for disobedience, lack of learning and a distraction from prayer. As Laura F. Hodges points out, there is a difference between the Virgin’s exemplary textile production, and that of Eve, which carries with it the taint of her original sin.96
Conclusion
The gendering of medieval textile production was complex. It is not just a story of women’s work, and nor is it a simple narrative in which women’s textile production was progressively taken over by men and relegated to the domestic sphere. It was dependent on ideological as well as economic and social factors, and there were enormous variations across time and place, and across and within different crafts. Whether men or women undertook particular aspects of textile production in specific times and places was governed by factors including their relative economic and social influence, their access to the technology and equipment of their craft, their purchasing power or other means of acquiring the raw materials that they needed. The types of textile work they could undertake were influenced by whether they lived in the country or the town, their access to suitable space, and how well their craft fitted around the other demands on their time. The nature of their work might be limited by their physical ability and health. Their relationship to the means of production, whether as an owner of a business, an employee or a dependent or independent pieceworker, determined whether their work had the potential to be profitable, while their social status affected whether they needed to make a living from their textile work, or whether they worked to clothe their families. For women, their ability to carry on a particular trade could depend on their marital status, and the regulations of the relevant guild. Women and men understood their textile work within the framework of social and religious ideology. The act of making thread or cloth or narrow wares might be considered either as normative or subversive, morally worthy, or tainted with the sin of Eve.
In examining and suggesting explanations for how medieval textile production was gendered, I acknowledge that there will be exceptions which do not fit the patterns, cases where women engaged in forms of textile production which might be expected to have been men’s work, and men whose textile making might be considered women’s work, despite the prevailing notions of gender within particular crafts. There were certainly individuals who had more or less power as a result of their textile production than overarching theories of gender might suggest, but such theories nevertheless provide a frame within which these anomalies might be understood. The medieval realities of gender and textile production must be disentangled from the assumptions made about women’s work by subsequent eras, and careful distinctions need to be made between the actuality of how textile production was gendered and the ideals which governed the ways that it was represented and understood in the Middle Ages. Documentary records need to be treated with caution, and supplemented by evidence from archaeological, lexical, visual, and literary sources, themselves also appropriately and carefully interpreted in the light of prevailing tropes and traditions. Medieval ideals of gender, and the representations they informed, doubtless had an impact on how practice was gendered, as women and men sought to work in ways that they considered appropriate for their gender. Medieval gender, ultimately, both constructed and was constructed by the work of producing textiles.
Notes
1Richard B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Bath: Pitman, 1970), 373–75. Ball was probably adapting a text earlier used by Richard Rolle: ‘When Adam dalfe and Eve spane / So spire if thou may spede / Where was then the pride of man / That nowe merres his mede?’. George G. Perry, ed., Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse, EETS O.S. 26, 2nd edn. (London: Kegan-Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1914), 79.
2Glasgow, University of Glasgow, Special Collections, MS Hunter U.3.2 (229), fol. 8r, c. 1170.
3Influential examples include Marian K. Dale, ‘The London Silkwomen of the Fifteenth Century’, Economic History Review 1st ser., 4 (1933): 324–35, whose conclusions were reviewed by Maryanne Kowaleski and Judith M. Bennett in ‘Crafts, Gilds, and Women in the Middle Ages: Fifty Years After Marian K. Dale’, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1989); David Herlihy, Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990), especially 75–102; Elizabeth Wayland Barber, Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth and Society in Early Times (New York: Norton, 1994); Martha C. Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); P.J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Recent overviews of the field of medieval women’s textile production are included in Kathryn Reyerson, ‘Urban Economies’, and Jane Whittle, ‘Rural Economies’, in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
4For examples, see the body of work by John H. Munro, especially ‘Medieval Woollens: Textiles, Textile Technology and Industrial Organisation, c. 800–1500’, in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, Volume 1, ed. D.T. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Angela Ling Huang and Carsten Jahnke, eds., Textiles and the Medieval Economy: Production, Trade and the Consumption of Textiles, 8th–16th Centuries (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2015).
5Examples include Stephanie Trigg, ‘“Ye Louely Ladyes with Youre Longe Fyngres”: The Silkwomen of Medieval London’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 38 (2002): 469–84; Monica L. Wright, ‘“De Fil d’Or et de Soie”: Making Textiles in Twelfth-Century French Romance’, Medieval Textiles and Clothing 2 (2006): 61–72; and E. Jane Burns, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
6Examples include Sue Harrington, Aspects of Gender Identity and Craft Production in the European Migration Periods: Iron Weaving Beaters and Associated Textile Making Tools from England, Norway and Alamannia, British Archaeological Reports, S1797 (Oxford: John and Erica Hedges, 2008); Ingvild Øye, ‘Production, Quality and Social Status in Viking Age Dress’, Medieval Clothing and Textiles 11 (2015): 2–7.
7See, for example, Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1982); and Alexandra Gajewski and Stefanie Seeberg, ‘Having her Hand in it? Elite Women as “Makers” of Textile Art in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval History 42 (2016).
8For a rare example, see R.L. Wyss, ‘Die Handarbeiten der Maria’, in Artes Minores: Dank an Werner Abegg, ed. Michael Stettler and Mechthild Lemberg (Bern: Stamfili, 1973).
9See Kathryn M. Rudy and Barbara Baert, eds., Weaving, Veiling, Dressing: Textiles and their Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).
10Parker, Subversive Stitch.
11Parker, Subversive Stitch, 43–47.
12Brigitte Kurmann-Schwarz, ‘Gender and Medieval Art’, in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006).
13Marc Fitch, ‘The London Makers of Opus Anglicanum’, Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society 27 (1976): 288–96; Sharon Farmer, ‘Medieval Paris and the Mediterranean: The Evidence from the Silk Industry’, French Historical Studies 37 (2014): 395. Farmer notes that the list of members of the Paris Embroiderers’ Guild compiled around 1300 includes seventy-nine female members and fifteen male members.
14Michael Camille, ‘At the Sign of the “Spinning Sow”: The “Other” Chartres and Images of Everyday Life of the Medieval Street’, in History and Images: Towards a New Iconology, ed. A. Bolvig and P. Lindley (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003). Frances Biscoglio, writing in 1995, stated ‘since its origins spinning has always been gender-determined: it is exclusively feminine work’; see ‘The Iconography of the Spinning Woman in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5 (1995): 163. Eileen Power’s highly influential book Medieval Women, first published in 1975, but based on lectures given decades earlier, states that spinning was practised ‘almost exclusively by women’. Medieval Women, ed. M.M. Postan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 65. Subsequent writers hardened this view to a certainty. Evidence for men spinning will be discussed further, below.
15Roberta Gilchrist, discussing finds of spindle whorls, needles, thimbles, scissors, shears, and a wool comb at a priests’ community in York, argues that ‘in medieval culture these objects and activities are associated exclusively with women, and their presence strongly suggests that female domestic servants were living in Vicar’s Choral’. Medieval Life: Archaeology and the Life Course (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), 131. An alternative possibility is that when living in an all-male environment, men undertook textile work to supply their own needs. Shane McLeod has recently shown that swords do not always denote male burials in the Viking period. ‘Warriors and Women: The Sex Ratio of Norse Migrants to Eastern England up to 900 CE’, Early Medieval Europe 19 (2011).
16René de Lespinasse and François Bonnardot, Les métiers et corporations de la ville de Paris: XIIIe siècle. Le livre des métiers d’Etienne Boileau (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1879).
17Only some of these rolls have been published. For a discussion of the data the rolls contain, see J.M. Archer, ‘Working Women in Thirteenth-Century Paris’ (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1995), 77–79.
18Archer, ‘Working Women’.
19Sharon Farmer, ‘Medieval Paris and the Mediterranean’; and The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
20Archer, ‘Working Women’, 17–22.
21Archer, ‘Working Women’, 106.
22Farmer, Silk Industries, 9.
23Archer, ‘Working Women’, 252–53.
24Farmer estimates, by extrapolating from the records, that ‘there were somewhere around 1,418 Parisian women who contributed to the production of silk cloth and narrow ware and that they constituted at least 80 per cent of the artisans who participated in the activities that were necessarily for the production of those textiles’. Silk Industries, 107. Archer also discusses crafts which she classifies as ‘needlework’, including some of the making of clothing and accessories and household goods, for which the gender distinctions are less clear. ‘Working Women’, 257–59.
25Archer, ‘Working Women’, 252–53.
26Images of the fibre-working women, believed to depict the active life, can be seen at https://throughjillseyes.wordpress.com/2014/10/29/the-active-life-six-sculptures-at-the-chartres-cathedral/. Accessed March 12, 2018. Although these images have often been described as ‘women working wool’, they actually depict both wool and linen preparation. The first sculpture, working upwards from the bottom of the left side of the archivolt, shows a woman washing wool, the second combing (rather than carding) wool, the third scutching flax, and the fourth hackling flax. The fifth and sixth images, which show women spinning and winding yarn, could depict either wool or linen.
27Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Plut. 89 sup. 117.
28Ilja M. Veldman, ‘Representations of Labour in Late Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Prints: The Secularization of the Work Ethic’, in The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to Modern Times, ed. Josef Ehmer and Catharina Lis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 149.
29See Gerhard Jaritz, ‘The Visual Representation of Late Medieval Work: Patterns of Context, People and Action’, in The Idea of Work, ed. Ehmer and Lis.
30Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.17.1, fol. 263. Accessed August 20, 2017. http://trin-sites-pub.trin.cam.ac.uk/james/viewpage.php?index=1229.
31Herlihy, Opera Muliebria, cover image, 81–83. The corresponding image is in the Utrecht Psalter (Utrecht, Universiteitsbibliotheek, MS Bibl. Rhenotraiectinae I Nr 32, fol. 83). Accessed August 20, 2017. http://psalter.library.uu.nl/page?p=174&res=3&x=0&y=0.
32The looms most commonly used in Europe in the early Middle Ages were variations on the vertical loom, in which the cloth was woven in an upwards direction, and the warps were held in place either with a lower beam or by being tied in bundles to weights.
33Isaiah 38:12 (NIV). The large shears held by two of the women in the image reference the cutting of the cloth from the loom.
34Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 507, fol. 2r.
35On the technical and gender differences between these types of loom, see Agnes Geijer, A History of Textile Art: A Selective Account (Stockholm: Pasold Research Fund, 1979), 30–35, 77–80.
36Constance H. Berman, ‘Women’s Work in Family, Village and Town after 1000 CE: Contribution to Economic Growth?’, Journal of Women’s History 19 (2007): 15–16.
37Examples of women weaving using a horizontal floor loom include a frequently reproduced image of the biblical character Naamah from the Egerton Gospels (London, British Library, MS Egerton 1894, fol. 2v); and images of Penelope, Minerva, and Tanaquil, especially in illustrations of Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (e.g., Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS fr. 598) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (e.g., London, British Library, MS Royal 17 E IV, fol. 87v). Men are depicted using horizontal floor looms in the donor images in the thirteenth-century windows of SS Savinien, Potentien, and Modesta, and of SS Theodore and Vincent in Chartres cathedral, and in fifteenth-century portraits of named guild members in the Mendel Hausbuch (Amb. 317.2°, fol. 38 (Mendel I)).
38Burns, Sea of Silk, 1.
39For a discussion of these textiles, usually embroideries, see Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, ‘Holy Women and the Needle Arts: Piety, Devotion, and Stitching the Sacred ca. 500–1150’, in Negotiating Community and Difference in Medieval Europe: Gender, Power, Patronage, and the Authority of Religion in Latin Christendom, ed. Katherine Allen Smith and Scott Wells (Leiden: Brill, 2009). However, Gajewski and Seeberg argue that while numerous medieval records specified that elite women made textiles ‘with their own hands’, it is impossible to know the extent to which they really were personally responsible, rather than acting in a supervisory capacity, noting that the term ‘fecit’ can denote a broader range of meaning than simply ‘made’, also encompassing commissioning and patronage, ‘Having her Hand in it?’, 26–50.
40Trigg, ‘Ye Louely Ladyes’, 476–80. In Yvain, the imprisoned women undertake silk weaving, but it is likely that they are weaving narrow wares rather than cloth, as discussed below.
41See Oxford English Dictionary entry for -ster, suffix.
42The dates quoted in the following discussion are those given for earliest attestation in the Oxford English Dictionary.
43The Oxford English Dictionary equates the term throwster with silkwoman, attested from 1440, but it is clear from the 1455 petition to parliament from both the silkwomen and throwsters that silkwoman was a broader term, encompassing working silk thread into finished articles. See also Dale, ‘London Silkwomen’.
44While the term was used in the Northumbrian poem Cursor Mundi to describe the biblical Naamah, its use is testament to its currency. The southern version of the poem describes her as a webbe.
45The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, vol. 12 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2012), 60.
46See Archer, ‘Working Women’, 252–58.
47Howell presents a discussion of previous scholars espousing this view, as well as discussing other factors influencing the gender divisions in late medieval textile productions, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 176. Berman notes that the argument that women did not have sufficient strength for weaving was one made in late medieval Norwich, ‘Women’s Work’, 498 n. 49. John Munro also rehearses, and questions, the argument that the shift in the gendering of weaving from feminine to masculine was due to the strength required to operate the horizontal loom, ‘Medieval Woollens’, 221.
48Archer, ‘Working Women’, 258, 266–68.
49For examples, see manuscript illuminations in the Da Costa Hours, New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS M. 399, fol. 12v; the Très Riches Heures of the Duc de Berry, Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château (formerly Musée Condé), MS 65, fol. 6v; and an illuminated copy of The Decameron, in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5070, fol. 51v.
50Archer, ‘Working Women’, 115.
51Barber, Women’s Work, 29–30. Judith Brown, ‘A Note on the Division of Labour by Sex’, American Anthropologist, 72 (1970).
52While in urban and commercial contexts, there was room for specialisation in textile production, with workers undertaking discrete aspects of the textile processes, in rural and domestic contexts, end to end processing from raw fibre to finished cloth could be performed in the home. See Whittle, ‘Rural Economies’, 312.
53John H. Munro, ‘Gold, Guilds and Government: The Impact of Monetary and Labour Policies on the Flemish Cloth Industry, 1390–1435’, Jaarboek Voor Middeleeuwse Geschiedenis 5 (2002): 174.
54Luttrell Psalter, London, British Library, MS Additional 42130, fol. 166v, lower margin illustration.
55London, British Library, MS Royal 15 E III, fol. 269.
56The Livre des métiers records a small number of women working as cloth dyers, presumably in workshops, and the separate craft of silk dyers, who presumably dyed yarn rather than cloth, is exclusively female. Archer, ‘Working Women’, 153.
57Munro, ‘Medieval Woollens’, 204–05.
58Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 58.
59Archer, ‘Working Women’, 56.
60Archer argues that the ouvrières de soie, of which there are seventy-seven listed compared to four ouvriers, are weavers since many of them are listed with the weavers’ guild, but it is far more likely that the majority of them are throwsters, with the large number needed to twist reeled silk thread into yarn for the silk weavers. ‘Working Women’, 58.
61Farmer, Silk Industries, 108.
62Whittle, ‘Rural Economies’, 312.
63Herlihy argues that while women made most cloth in domestic settings before 1000, men gradually became more involved in clothmaking during the central Middle Ages, and had taken over all but the low-status aspects of cloth production by the end of the fifteenth century. Opera Muliebria, ix.
64Archer, ‘Working Women’, 115. Archer appears to be making a distinction between the occupations of filandrière and filaresse which are listed separately in the Livre des métiers, but it is not clear that the source intended a distinction between the sizes of the spindles. Farmer suggests that the large spindles might be spinning wheels but wheel spinners are listed separately as filaresses a touret. Farmer, ‘Medieval Paris’, 388; Archer, ‘Working Women’, 252.
65Munro, ‘Medieval Woollens’, 200.
66Reyerson, ‘Urban Economies’, 296.
67Archer, ‘Working Women’, 116.
68Archer, ‘Working Women’, 116.
69Louise M. Sylvester, Marc C. Chambers, and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, eds., Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 370. Although this work focuses on medieval textiles in England, the term is used in French language contexts.
70Chrétien de Troyes, ‘Perceval’, ll. 2804–05, trans. D.D.R. Owen, Arthurian Romances (London: Dent, 1987), 411.
71Elisabeth Crowfoot, Frances Pritchard, and Kay Staniland, Textiles and Clothing c. 1150–1450 (London: H.M.S.O., 1992), 6.
72Dale, ‘London Silkwomen’, 324. A subsequent petition to Parliament in 1482 was presented by a much broader group, ‘menne and women on the hole craft of Silkewerk of the Cite of London and all other Citeis, Townes, Boroghes, and Vilages of this Realme of Englond’. Rotoli Parliamentorum (Rec. Comm., 1832), V, 325a, VI, 222b.
73Munro argues on the basis of iconography that the earliest versions of the horizontal loom were operated by women but that when the more complicated broadloom evolved, they were exclusively operated by men. John H. Munro, ‘Textile Production for the Market’, in Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopaedia, ed. Margaret Schaus (New York: Routledge, 2006), 792. However, as discussed earlier, the interpretation of this iconography needs to be undertaken with care.
74Munro, ‘Medieval Woollens’, 201.
75The donor image depicting the weavers in the window of SS Savinien and Potentien in Chartres Cathedral, c. 1210–1225, shows a man using a spinning wheel, but he is using it to wind shuttle bobbins from a swift, rather than to spin. Accessed May 19, 2017.
www.medievalart.org.uk/chartres/17_pages/Chartres_Bay17_Panel18.htm. See also the discussion of the images of spinning from the Smithfield Decretals, p. 90.
76Munro, ‘Medieval Woollens’, 201–03.
77‘What sholde we wommen werche the while?’
William Langland, Piers Plowman, B text, Passus VI, ll. 8–16. In this passage Langland sets out divisions of textile labour for women based on their social standing.
78See, for example, Kowaleski and Bennett, ‘Craft, Gilds and Women’, 21; and Howell, Women, Production, and Patriarchy, 9–11. See also chapters in this volume by Anne Montenach and Jeremy Goldberg for the ways that late medieval and early modern women worked to mitigate this disadvantage.
79Susan Broomhall, ‘Women, Work and Power in the Female Guilds of Rouen’, in Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008).
80Reyerson, ‘Urban Economies’, 298–99.
81Genesis 3:7, 16–21 (NIV).
82Proverbs 31:10–24 (NIV).
83Wyss, ‘Die Handarbeiten der Maria’. These images often associate the act of spinning with the Virgin’s state of pregnancy.
84Wyss, ‘Die Handarbeiten der Maria’. The images of the Virgin knitting may be based on the tradition that she made Christ’s ‘seamless garment’ for which the soldiers drew lots at the Crucifixion (John 19:23).
85The only two images of the Virgin weaving cloth of which I am aware are a depiction in stained glass from the Cathedral of Ulm, c. 1395–1400 (accessed August 20, 2017; http://id.corpusvitrearum.de/images/2084.html), and a woodcut image from Johann Grashove’s Boek Van Der Bedroffenisse Marien, 1486. In these instances, the first depicting the Virgin’s education in the Temple, and the second in the context of the Holy Family, she is weaving at a vertical loom. I am grateful to Mark Calderwood, Vicki Bismire, and Dr Katrina Hunt for directing my attention to these images. I have not found any depiction of the Virgin using a horizontal loom.
86Examples include Luttrell Psalter, London, British Library, MS Additional 42130, fol. 60 and a Netherlandish metal plate, c. 1480, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Acquisition Number 64.101.1499.
87For ways of reading marginal images as subversive, see Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion, 1992), especially 9–10.
88London, British Museum, No. 1873, 0809.651.
89London, British Library, MS Royal 10 E IV, fol. 147v, c. 1300–1340. The British Library website suggests that they might represent a housewife setting tasks for her husband or lover, but many of the tasks in this sequence do not obviously represent such a narrative. Accessed August 20, 2017. www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Royal_MS_10_e_iv.
90Andrew Taylor, ‘Playing on the Margins: Bakhtin and the Smithfield Decretals’, in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, ed. Thomas J. Farrell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 17.
91Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, ll. 401–02.
92Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, intro. and trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, 1999), 141.
93Pizan, City of Ladies, 215. On this and the dialectic between women weaving and writing, see Natasha Amendola, ‘Weaving Virtue: Laura Cereta as a New Penelope’, in Virtue Ethics for Women, 1250–1500, ed. Karen Green and Constant Mews (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011).
94Catherine Batt, ‘The Idioms of Women’s Work and Thomas Hoccleve’s Travails’, in The Middle Ages at Work: Practicing Labor in late Medieval England, ed. Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004).
95Jeffrey Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 182.
96Laura F. Hodges, ‘Noe’s Wife: Type of Eve and Wakefield Spinner’, in Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Boston Holloway, Joan Bechtold, and Constance S. Wright (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 31–32.
Select bibliography
Archer, J.M. ‘Working Women in Thirteenth-Century Paris’. PhD diss., University of Arizona, 1995.
Bennett, Judith M., and Ruth Mazo Karras, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Burns, E. Jane. Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2009.
Dale, Marian K. ‘The London Silkwomen of the Fifteenth Century’. Economic History Review, 1st ser., 4 (1933): 324–35.
Farmer, Sharon. The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris: Artisanal Migration, Technological Innovation, and Gendered Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Gajewski, Alexandra, and Stefanie Seeberg. ‘Having her Hand in it? Elite Women as “Makers” of Textile Art in the Middle Ages’. Journal of Medieval History 42 (2016): 26–50.
Munro, John H. ‘Medieval Woollens: Textiles, Textile Technology and Industrial Organisation, c. 800–1500’. In The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, Volume 1, ed. D.T. Jenkins, 181–227. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: The Women’s Press, 1982.