Emotional Textiles: An Introduction

Abstract

This special issue brings together material culture and the history of emotions to explore the emotive properties of textiles in Northwest Europe from the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries. It is the first detailed study of the changing emotional meanings of a particular type of material - textiles - from the metallic lace adorning christening robes, to union cloth burial clothes. The six articles are contributed by historians and museum professionals from a range of disciplines. These authors harness a variety of sources and methodologies to interrogate the emotional repertoire of textiles, and the emotive process of research itself.

Keywords:

• emotions
• affect
• material culture
• gender
• life-cycle
• making
• craft

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Catherine Harper for inviting us to edit this special issue, and the contributors for sharing their work. Anonymous peer reviewers generously gave their time to provide helpful insights. Several institutions have kindly granted permission to use their images. The conference and special issue were made possible by funding from John Styles’ project “Spinning in the Era of the Spinning Wheel, 1400‒1800,” funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement n. 249512.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alice Dolan

Alice Dolan holds the Economic History Society Anniversary Fellowship for 2015/16 and is affiliated to the Institute of Historical Research and UCL. Her postdoctoral project explores the impact of mechanized textile production on working-class clothing in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her PhD thesis examined why linen remained a daily necessity in eighteenth-century England despite the availability of cotton as a viable alternative. It explored diverse aspects of daily life from child labor and personal decency to shrouds and the commercial use of linens.

Sally Holloway

Sally Holloway completed her AHRC-funded PhD at Royal Holloway in 2013, and is currently converting the thesis into a monograph on romantic love in Georgian England. She is currently an Associate Researcher at Historic Royal Palaces, Affiliated Research Scholar at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, and Early Career International Research Fellow at the Australian Centre of Excellence for the History of the Emotions. [email protected]