‘Informed Seeing’: Reading the Seventeenth-Century Embroidered Cabinet at Milton Manor House through its Historical and Social Contexts

Abstract

This object lesson examines a seventeenth-century cabinet, held at Milton Manor House in Oxfordshire, which has been embroidered with biblical scenes. Starting from the premise that knowledge informs seeing, this article provides a close reading of the cabinet’s iconography and historical context in order to highlight the knowledge — both the general ideologies and the individual interpretation — that may have informed its production. Through a detailed reading, the maker’s negotiation of the virtue of submissiveness, a major tenet of women’s education in the period, is identified as a possible theme.

Acknowledgements

For the invitation to participate in this AHRC project, I am grateful to Dr Catherine Richardson and Dr Tara Hamling. Enormous thanks also to Gwendoline Marsh and Sir Anthony Mockler-Barrett for graciously allowing me to visit them at their home and to photograph the Milton Manor Cabinet.

Notes

¹ The cabinet is located at Milton Manor House, in the small village of Milton, ten miles south of Oxford, where it was the property of the late Marjorie Mockler (d. 1990), and is now owned by her son, Sir Anthony Mockler-Barrett. Unfortunately, earlier provenance details are unknown. In my analysis of over 200 pieces of seventeenth-century needlework for my doctoral thesis, ‘The Bible, the Senses and the Virtues: Popular Topics in British Women’s Seventeenth-Century Needlework’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Lancaster, 2015), this is one of the few pieces where the red has not faded to pink.

² Domestic needlework projects with pictorial scenes, such as this cabinet, were produced by young women in large numbers across England, Scotland and Wales during the second half of the seventeenth century. For a catalogue of over 700 surviving domestic needlework projects made in the seventeenth century, see V. R. Geuter, ‘Women and Embroidery in Seventeenth-Century Britain: The Social, Religious, and Political Meanings of Domestic Needlework’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wales, 1996), Appendix G.

³ For the role of embroidered cabinets as culminating projects in a young women’s needlework training, see K. Staples, ‘Embroidered furnishings: questions of production and usage’, in A. Morrall and M. Watt eds, English Embroidery from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1580–1700: ‘Twixt Art and Nature’ (New York and New Haven: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2008), pp. 23–37; Staples notes that the identified makers were young and unmarried. A letter contained inside an embroidered cabinet at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (WA 1947.191.315) indicates that cabinets were embroidered at women’s academies in the mid-seventeenth century, thus reinforcing the connection with education. See M. M. Brooks, English Embroideries of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: In the Collection of the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2004), pp. 40–43. While it is possible that the Milton Manor cabinet was the result of collaborative work, the stitching and materials are uniform and there is no reason to suspect it was made by more than one embroiderer.

⁴ ‘Informed seeing’ was a concept investigated across the second and third workshops of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded network ‘Ways of Seeing the English Domestic Interior, 1500–1700: The Case of Decorative Textiles’, led by Catherine Richardson and Tara Hamling, and held on 19 March 2013 at Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire. Both this object lesson and the special issue as a whole have arisen out of the network.

⁵ S. Spotorno, G. L. Malcolm and B. W. Tatler, ‘How context information and target information guide the eyes from the first epoch of search in real-world scenes’, Journal of Vision, xiv, no. 2 (2014), pp. 1–21. For the science of vision being applied to reading, see A. Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), especially chapter 6. See also B. W. Tatler, R. G. Macdonald, T. Hamling and C. Richardson, ‘Looking at domestic textiles: an eye-tracking experiment analysing influences on viewing behaviour at Owlpen Manor’ in this special issue.

⁶ A. Vanhaelen and B. Wilson, ‘The erotics of looking: materiality, solicitation and Netherlandish visual culture’, Art History, xxxv, no. 5 (2012), p. 880.

⁷ A. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 242–43.

⁸ See, for example, Y. Bleyerveld, ‘Chaste, obedient, and devout: biblical women as patterns of female virtue in the Netherlandish and German graphic art, ca. 1500–1750’, Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, xxviii, no. 4 (2000–2001), pp. 219–50; C. Peters, Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Later Medieval and Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), especially pp. 246–69; L. Pollock, ‘“Teach her to live under obedience”: the making of women in the upper ranks of early modern England’, Continuity and Change, iv, no. 2 (1989), pp. 231–58; R. O’Day, Education and Society 1500–1800: The Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (New York: Longman, 1982), pp. 185–95; A. Shepard, Meanings in Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 31–33.

⁹ H. Bullinger, The Golde[n] Boke of Christen Matrimonye, trans. M. Coverdale and T. Becon (London: by Joh[a]n Mayler for Joh[a]n Gough, 1543), chapter xx, p. lxv.

¹⁰ For titles circulating in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England that praised biblical women as exemplars for young women, see T. Heywood, The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine of the Most Worthy Women of the World (London: printed by Thomas Cotes, for Richard Royston, 1640); T. Bentley, The Monument of Matrones (London: printed by H. Denham, 1582). For other western and central European titles, see Bleyerveld, ‘Chaste, obedient, and devout’, pp. 219–50.

¹¹ Genesis 21: 1–13 records how Sarah became jealous of her maidservant Hagar and her son Ishmael (who was fathered by Abraham) and told Abraham to cast them out of the household.

¹² ‘The Expulsion of Hagar and Ishamel’, embroidered panel, c. 1650, 49.7 × 52.3 cm, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, A.1958.85.

¹³ G. de Jode, Thesaurus Sacrarum Historiarum Veteris Testamenti (Amsterdam: Sumptibus expensis G. De Iode, 1585).

¹⁴ For two examples of the standard depiction of the Expulsion of Hagar and Ishmael in women’s needlework, see embroidered panel, Burrell Collection, Glasgow, 29/48; embroidered panel, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 125-1878. For a more detailed analysis, see Pullan, ‘The Bible, the Senses and the Virtues’, chapter 1.

¹⁵ For an account of the different interpretations of Sarah’s role, see J. L. Thompson, Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 30, 41, 49.

¹⁶ ‘In all that Sarah hath said unto thee, hearken unto her voice: for in Isaac shall thy seed be called’. Genesis 21: 12 [AV].

¹⁷ W. Perkins, A Commentarie or Exposition, upon the Five First Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (London: printed by John Legat, 1604), p. 363.

¹⁸ J. Cats, Al de Wercken van Jacob Cats (1654), p. 170, quoted by C. P. Sellin, Fractured Families and Rebel Maidservants: The Biblical Hagar in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Literature (London: T. and T. Clark International, 2006), p. 47.

¹⁹ Exact figures for expenditure on embroidered cabinets are difficult to find, but the cost can be estimated at more than 30s (more than the cost of three pairs of shoes) based on an account sheet belonging to a family in Warwickshire titled ‘Account for Peggy’s disbursements since her going to schoole at Richmonde [Sept. 1646]’, quoted in M. Reynolds, The Learned Lady in England 1650–1760 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), pp. 42–43.

²⁰ For example, see the diary kept by embroiderer Gertrude Savile, which testifies to the amount of time she spent on hiring servants. G. Savile, Secret Comment: The Diaries of Gertrude Savile 1721–1757, ed. A. Savile (Kingsbridge: Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire, 1997). On the substantial amount of time élite women spent with servants, see F. Dolan, Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 104–08. The continued importance of managing and retaining servants among eighteenth-century gentlewomen is considered in A. Vickery, The Gentlewoman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 135–41.

²¹ ‘And the water was spent in the bottle, and shee cast the child under one of the shrubs’, Genesis 21: 15 [AV].

²² For an example of an embroidered panel where a lion with a bloody bone in his mouth has been worked to represent the story’s theme of revenge, see L. Arthur, Embroidery 1600–1700, at the Burrell Collection (Glasgow: John Murray and Glasgow Museums, 1995), pp. 92–93.

²³ For an interpretation of this gesture and discussion of the five laudable conditions of Mary at the Annunciation according to the fifteenth-century Florentine friar Fra Roberto Caracciolo, see M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, first published 1972), pp. 51–56, 61–66. For a more detailed explanation of this pose and its significance in the expulsion narrative, see Pullan, ‘The Bible, the Senses and the Virtues’, pp. 86–87.

²⁴ Thompson, Writing the Wrongs, pp. 38, 41, 49, 74–78, 84–85, 92.

²⁵ Most needlework depictions of the Sacrifice of Isaac include a ram in the bushes. This also featured in De Jode’s Thesaurus, but is missing in the Milton Manor cabinet. For a detailed reading of the themes of obedience and Christ’s sacrifice in household furnishings, see T. Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 238–45.

²⁶ Genesis 24: 1–67.

²⁷ A. Pullan, ‘Needlework and moral instruction in English seventeenth-century households: the case of Rebecca’, in J. Doran, C. Methuen and A. Walsham eds, Religion and the Household: Studies in Church History, l (2014), pp. 254–68.

²⁸ ‘And Isaac brought her into his mother Sarahs tent and tooke Rebekah and she became his wife and he wed her: and Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death’, Genesis 24: 67 [AV].

²⁹ Mary Gostelow suggests that the figures represented Charles II and his wife Catherine of Braganza, or Solomon and Sheba. Gostelow, The Art of Embroidery, pp. 140–41. The importance of the gifts suggests that it was Sheba before Solomon.

³⁰ Geuter, ‘Women and Embroidery in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, p. 285.

³¹ A. R. Jones, ‘Needle, scepter, sovereignty: the Queen of Sheba in Englishwomen’s amateur needlework’, Early Modern Culture (Online, 2003), p. 31. Available from: http://emc.eserver.org/1-3/jones.html [Accessed: 14 November 2015].

³² ‘And King Solomon gave unto the Queen of Sheba at her desire, whatsoever she asked, besides that which Solomon gave her of his royall bountie’, 1 Kings 10: 1–13, v.13 [AV], ‘And King Solomon gave to the Queene of Sheba, all her desire, whatsoever she asked besides that which she had brought unto the king’, 2 Chronicles 9: 1–12, v.12 [AV].

³³ P. F. Watson, ‘The Queen of Sheba in Christian tradition’, in J. Pritchard ed., Solomon and Sheba (London: Paidon, 1974), pp. 18–19. I am indebted to Nicolai Kölmel, University of Basel, for this reference.

³⁴ D. O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 190–91.

³⁵ Thanks to the anonymous referee for observing that the motif resembles a primrose.