Handiwork, especially needlework and other textile work, played a key role in early-modern elite culture. Apart from being women’s never-ending task and socially gendered activity, handiwork acted both as a means for comfort and as a source of comfort. With a needle, thread, precious materials and embroidering skills elite women ...
(Show more)Handiwork, especially needlework and other textile work, played a key role in early-modern elite culture. Apart from being women’s never-ending task and socially gendered activity, handiwork acted both as a means for comfort and as a source of comfort. With a needle, thread, precious materials and embroidering skills elite women created comfortable materiality and visible representations of well-being, wealth and taste at home in the country house. These places were key spaces for aristocratic sociability, in which handiwork was part of mix-gendered social life. While scholars have been mostly interested in feminine handiwork and textile work, in early-modern Europe handiwork was also a masculine sphere: elite men spent time in manual work, such as turning or other woodwork, sometimes also needlework, often a source of emotional comfort.
This paper will explore gendered elite handiwork in the eighteenth-century Swedish and Finnish country houses, focusing on how handiwork linked to comfort, well-being and material culture. It analyses handiwork as a key issue in elite mix-gendered sociability, and seeks to answer to what was the role of skills in performing handiwork crafts and creating comfort for country house sociability.
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