It's just after four o'clock here in Oxford,
so I'll kick off. Hello again, and welcome to this first talk in the Textiles Library 'Context and conservation' series.
My name is Alice Evans and I'm an assistant book conservator here at the Bodleian,
and I'm speaking to you from the conservation studio at the Weston Library in Oxford.
This series of talks is a collaboration between the Conservation and Collection Care Team here at the Bodleian and the Centre for the Study of
the Book and all our speakers in this series will be exploring textiles found across library collections in many unexpected and expected places.
It is part of a project which began with our team looking at the housing of our collection of embroidered bindings,
which then prompted us to start thinking about all the other places we can find textiles,
from endbands, sewing threads and covering materials and bindings, to objects such as tapestries,
puppets and items of clothing. As well as the series of public talks,
the project is continuing behind the scenes as our team works to develop our own
understanding of these objects and how best to care for them through outreach
events and training, which is being generously funded by friend of the Library, T A Barron.
Just to let you know some housekeeping things before we start today's session: we are recording this event,
but as it is a Zoom webinar, your audio and camera will be turned off so you won't appear in the video.
We will be sharing a link to the recording in about a week or so's time,
and it will also be available on the University Podcast website as well as the Bodleian YouTube channel.
And we'll also be sharing a list of shelf marks of the objects we'll be showing today.
In this session, my colleagues will be sharing amazing objects with youand we would love for you to be involved in the discussion,
so please do type any questions you have in the Question and Answer box as we go and we will try to answer as many of them as we can.
We'll have a short question and answer session after each speaker has presented,
and we'll finish the session with some time for Q&A with the whole panel. So without further ado, I'll pass over to my colleague, Martin Kauffmann,
who is chairing today's session, and he will be introducing the rest of the panel. Thank you, Martin.
Thanks, Alice.
It's welcome, everyone, again. It's my pleasure to introduce our principal panellists who are my colleagues, my Bodleian colleagues.
Andrew Honey from the Conservation and Collection Care section and Andrew's going to be casting a
conservator's eye view over some of the materials and techniques of textiles in our books and manuscripts.
And Jo Maddox, Curator of Rare Books, who's going to be showing us some embroidered bindings on printed books
and one or two other surprise items. And finally, I'll be much more briefly just showing one use of textiles in our medieval illuminated manuscripts.
Andrew and I will be will be using PowerPoint slides, but much more bravely and ambitiously,
Jo will be using the visualiser - just a document camera to show live images of the embroidered bindings.
But first off, it's Andrew Honey. And over to you, Andrew.
Thank you. Paper, parchment, leather and adhesives might be the materials that spring to mind when we think about books.
But I'm going to use my brief time today to explore the equally important but less well known
textile materials and techniques that underpin so many of the books found in library collections.
This dual nature of books and their methods of manufacture was caught by Dirk de Bray in his early account of book binding. On the left of his sketch,
we can see two binders sewing books at sewing frames. And on the right,
a binder using glue with great relish on the spine of the book - adhesive that will also be used to attach the boards and cover the book with leather.
On the right of the slide is a print made by Chris Clarkson,
one of the pioneers of modern book conservation, and of the conservation department at the Bodleian.
It sums up his approach to book conservation as a break with 19th century binding traditions. Humorously
he hints that a reliance on glue might be seen as the work of the devil,
and he contrasts this with methods based on sound sewing that is on the side of the angels.
This afternoon, I will explore this more angelic side: the use of textiles and textile techniques within books at the Bodleian.
This will be a very brief overview and won't cover all the types of textiles that we find,
but hopefully the selection will be representative of those that survive,
as well as some that are lost, those that are obvious and some that are more hidden.
As a practising book conservator, I shouldn't be surprised that textiles are so important as they have been fundamental to my work,
and these three images show how sewing and textiles underpins my conservation work.
However, my conservation training didn't specifically include textiles, though it did include leather, parchment and paper,
and I'm very much looking forward to learning much more about textiles in libraries throughout this series of talks.
The bound codex at its most fundamental level is a series of pairs of leaves folded into quires that are joined together,
allowing a book to be opened, read and for the leaves to turn in a fixed order.
This mid 17th century Ethiopian manuscript eloquently demonstrates the reliance of books on sewing,
with two lengths of thread sewn to the wooden boards and used to sew the quires together, and it has an elegant simplicity.
It is the thread that turns the parchment and boards of this manuscript into a bound codex.
This reliance on sewing continues to this day. On occasions, it's necessary to rebind a mediaeval manuscript as part of its conservation.
And this slide shows a large 12th century English Bible on a sewing frame.
The methods we use are based on techniques seen in surviving early book bindings.
The individual quires have been sewn to five double cord sewing supports with a heavy linen thread.
The end leaves incorporate linen fabric,
and the cord sewing supports will be laced and wedged into new boards; endbands will be sewn head and tail and their cords also laid into the boards.
Bookbinding largely relies on textiles and sewing techniques to allow books to function,
though these might not be visible when the binding is completed and the binding is covered with leather.
Thread and sewing are also involved at earlier stages in the production of books.
This 11th century German manuscript shows the dramatic sewn repair to the parchment leaf.
Parchment makers process the skins of domesticated animals to produce a flexible,
strong and opaque sheet material ideally suited for writing. The skins are de-haired and then worked
while tensioned on a frame. Holes or flaws in the skin would stretch under this tension.
Parchment makers would often sew holds together to prevent this, as we can see here,
a sewn running repair to the parchment that was in place before the scribe copied out the text.
But it's not only threads and cords that are used within books,
this 17th century Armenian manuscript of the poetry of Araqel and Frik has a contemporary Armenian binding,
which uses a block printed fabric as the board and foredge flap lining.
The colours are similar to the elaborate endbands, but the linings and the endbands both have structural as well as decorative functions.
Perhaps surprisingly, textiles were a necessary part of the day-to-day operation of the Bodleian Library in the early 17th century.
Our accounts have regular payments for strings, tapes and inkle -
used to make fore-edge ties. That is two tapes on each board that were tied with a bow to keep the book closed.
These are now largely missing, having being removed in later centuries.
Here I show six books bound by William Wildgoose for the Bodleian in 1624 from a consignment sent to him, which included Shakespeare's First Folio.
Note that each has pinch points on the fore-edges of the boards caused by these narrow foredge ties.
There are payments between 1620 and 1638, totalling seven pounds, 17 shillings and eight pence for many yards of strings, tapes or inkle.
That is a narrow woven tape used for ties and presumably added within the Library.
At this date, all books in the Library were held closed, either with metal clasps or by textile ties.
And it's perhaps unsurprising that from at least 1640, there were annual payments of one shilling,
and I quote: 'to poor scholars for helping to tie books against the visitation' (end quote).
That is, to retie them ahead of the annual stocktake by the curators of the Library.
These many yards of narrow woven tape used for fore-edge ties are now very rare.
This is an Oxford binding from the early years of the Bodleian,
with the remains of these ties in the state that we normally find them: drab, faded fragments cut or broken at the board.
Luckily for us, the paste-downs within this book have been lifted,
which exposes the ends of the ties, and I'm surprised to see how vibrant the tape is.
The books were shelved with the fore-edges facing out,
and the rows of books with these brightly-coloured ties must have been an incredible sight within the Library,
although these textiles are now almost entirely lost.
This 12th century manuscript is a glossed Gospel of Luke from Canterbury in a contemporary Romanesque binding,
which is in incredibly good condition. It is covered in alum tawed deerskin, and would have been a vivid white when new,
and it retains its clasp and strap and elaborate tab endbands.
The monastic craftsmanship is exemplary, and the binding has an austere beauty.
However, within the manuscript, there is a green, braided silk bookmark.
And from small remains, we know that the clasp strap was once covered with a green silk textile and that
the edges of the tabs over the endbands were worked with green silk stitching.
Although the binding was overwhelmingly white, it had coordinated contrasting accents in green silk. Textiles,
sometimes used in small amounts and in conjunction with other materials,
were fundamental both to the use and the appearance of books, even if they are now sometimes missing.
Textiles have an equally long history in the repair of books.
This 15th century English manuscript has a contemporary binding, and it was acquired for the Library before 1602.
It was re-covered before it arrived with alum tawed sheepskin as part of the repair, which also used lengths of plain undyed textile.
The wooden board had split,
possibly when an earlier iron chain staple was removed, and the board was glued together and then bridged and supported by textile.
Linen braids, cords, threads and fabrics continue to be crucial to our current conservation.
This 12th century Worcester manuscript was re-bound in the 1880s and then re-covered in black velvet when it entered Henry VIII's library.
It has recently been conserved to repair the major split to the sewing and to reattach the boards,
and the velvet covering has been stabilised and supported by textile conservator Maria Haywood.
The conservation has relied on threads, braids and linen to bridge and repair the sewing,
extend the sewing supports and reattach the boards, and has relied primarily on mechanical textile means rather than adhesives -
the underlying principle of modern book conservation. The textiles that I've shown so far are not specific to books.
They could have been used for any number of purposes.
However, from the 1820s, we start to see textiles in the form of book cloth made specifically to cover books.
Much work by bibliographers to characterise the patterns of these book cloths can be used to accurately describe and in some cases, date the bindings.
This is the area of textiles in libraries with the most clearly developed terminology,
though work continues.
This binding, from 1839, uses a pre-ornamented book cloth, a rare technique of book cover decoration used between about 1835 and 1846.
It was first recognised and named by Jennifer Rosner and Andrea Krupp in 2000.
The designs of both spine and covers, with the view of Abbotsford and a portrait of Walter Scott, were embossed onto the cloth before it was used,
with the cloth passed through a press fitted with engraved cylinders.
Knowing how to describe textiles encountered or which terminology to use is difficult we find, this 14th century Italian manuscript, a Brunetto
Latini, with a green textile cover, was bequeathed to the Bodleian in 1834 by Francis Douce,
part of his large donation, which included almost 400 manuscripts.
Our summary catalogue describes 31 of these manuscripts as covered in velvet, or almost eight percent.
In this case, terminology might seem straightforward.
However, we know from his own notebooks that this manuscript was sent by him in November 1811 to the London binder,
Benjamin Pippin, to be (and I quote) 'covered in green plush'.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines plush as 'a rich fabric of silk, cotton, wool or other material, or any of these combined, with a long,
soft nap used especially for upholstery, servants' livery, etc'. Although at first sight this might appear to be a luxurious velvet cover,
it will take the expertise of textile historians to fully identify what materials were used.
Not all textiles that we encounter are luxurious and an understanding of textiles can help to indicate the relative status of the book.
This volume contains eight Dublin chap books,
all published by the Cheap repository for religious and moral tracts in the first two decades of the 19th century.
The binding is covered in a coarse textile with 'No. 4' stamped on the spine.
and 'Morville House Servants' Library' written on the board.
Morville Hall in Shropshire is now owned by the National Trust,
and its Servants' Library must have run to at least four volumes, as we can see. Hard-wearing canvas was used
from the 1760s as a cheaper alternative to leather and was primarily used for binding schoolbooks.
The use of it here within the Servants' Library surely indicates its lowly status.
To conclude, textiles in many forms and serving many purposes are found throughout our collections.
They were crucial to the production of books and have been vital for their use and repair over the centuries,
and I hope this brief overview has indicated some of this wide range.
My final example is stored with our glazed papyri and may well be the earliest bookbinding in the Bodleian's collections,
albeit one in a fragmentary state. Now housed between glass,
it is part two by folio of a parchment Biblical manuscript in Greek, from Egypt. Dated to the first half of the fifth century,
it retains a length of thread that was used to sew its binding: a four-ply undyed thread with a final twist direction of Z.
It could well be our earliest textile related to book production. And I think it's a reminder that we must consider textiles,
we must consider the textiles that we encounter if we are to have a full understanding of our collections and the methods required to care for them.
Thank you. Andrew, thank you so much.
What a wonderful range of materials and techniques you've shown us in a short time.
We're inviting the audience to send in questions and we've already got a very interesting one on some of the
qualities of textiles and their implications for conservation and particularly the acidity of textiles.
What effect does the acidity of textile have in degradation of these materials
compared to other components of the elements in the construction of these books?
That's that's a very good question, Martin,
and one that I can't quite answer. Which is why this series and this exploration and training that we're undertaking is so important.
I do know that the acidity and the differences between different dyes has effects on textiles that we see.
And I think these are questions that are going to be answered more fully by Maria Hayward and Jane Eagan in the last of our series of talks.
So I'm not answering the question, but hopefully we will later in the series.
Andrew, thank you. I've got a question of my own, if I may, which is about the dating of these textiles.
How easy is it to date them?
And what techniques do we have available to us to do so?
That may not be fair - but it's a really important question for us.
It's a great question. And it's just showing, I think, how much we have still to learn.
I think at the moment we're using our dating really in the same way that we would to look when something
was added in the binding or to look at its kind of codicological archaeology.
If we can say, has it been added when it was originally produced or later?
I think what will be interesting is with more connections to textile historians and experts,
I think hopefully they're going to be able to add even more information because I think beyond book cloth
within library circles, we don't really know an awful lot about the textiles we find.
Thank you. We've got a question here about the dye in textiles, textile dye.
Does it smear?
Are there any examples where the dye in a textile has smeared paper or parchment and given us a sort of conservation problem there?
Yes. I mean, we occasionally see where books have become damp that there may be an offset from textiles.
Certainly with book cloths and covering materials, sometimes we see that - bookmarks occasionally.
So, yes. But again, it's the same problem - we're trying to keep our books dry, so there are bigger issues.
But yes, we do sometimes see that.
And it's a big question about the kind of book cloth that we use for things like boxes now to ensure that they are both light-
fast and fast in water, just in case there ever was an emergency.
We don't want to cause further problems. Thank you, the questions are coming in thick and fast now,
but a very fundamental question about is there any relationship between the contents of the book and the choice of textiles used?
And I suppose beyond the obvious one that the richer the book, then perhaps the richer the textile used might be.
That's a very big question, and we don't have a lot of time. That's the joy of being a lowly conservator.
I mean, I can come at it from the material perspective, but it's the joy of working with curatorial colleagues to tease out some of those questions.
It would be interesting to see those 31 Douce manuscripts,
how many might he have had covered himself, and how many was he buying things a certain
class of manuscript that was deemed in the late 18th century to require a velvet cover?
Who knows? I'm just slipping in here a helpful comment that the technical term for offset from textile dye to other materials is 'crocking'.
But just finally, a question about the place of textiles in a study of books and bindings.
Is this a new aspect of the study of these books, or is it something obviously that we're beginning to focus on more,
but is it a new area of study in general, do you think?
I think it's becoming a new, a growing area.
I mean, I think for particularly sumptuous, some sumptuous textiles and some that we might see in a moment,
there has been a longer period of study, but I think it's always been at the kind of high end.
But rather than looking at textiles across the piece and across the entire spectrum, I think that's relatively new.
And certainly new for us. Thank you, Andrew, so much.
There are more questions coming in which we might have time for at the end,
but I'm going to move us on now to Jo Maddocks, Curator of Rare Books, who's going to show us some embroidered bindings.
I ought to mention, I said that Jo was using the visualiser to show live images of these books.
I ought to mention that Jo is in fact at home and the the mystery hands you will see are those of our colleague Sarah Wheale,
who will very kindly be handling the books in the Library for us.
Over to you, Jo and Sarah. Thanks very much, Martin. I am Jo,
I work in the Rare Books team. And before we start, I should probably say that I am not a textiles expert.
So if I make any mistakes in the description of any of these bindings, they are my mistakes.
And so please feel free to correct me in the comments.
I'd love to know more than I do about any of these things,
and hear your interpretations of them.
So ahead of the session, I've been thinking about what it is about textiles in books that we find so appealing.
And I think it's down to the fact that the fabric in this context is so unexpected,
it's so vulnerable, and it invites touch in a way that maybe other bookish materials don't.
So to kick off, we've got an embroidered binding here.
It's a gorgeous thing. It's got a claim to be one of the earliest embroidered bindings
that we have in the Library or the one that we've had in the Library the longest. Embroidered bindings I think are intriguing because
they undermine our expectations of what a binding should be, they don't protect the book,
they don't make it easier to store the book or handle the book in the way thaT A LEATHER
binding might do. In a way that might make it more vulnerable. So this binding is a binding that will reveal the book's use rather than conceal it.
So the book that you can see is a copy of the Essays of Francis Bacon.
It was printed in London in 1625.
And this copy is the presentation copy, which was bound for George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, to whom the book was dedicated.
It was customary for the author to present a specially bound copy of their work to the dedicatee.
And in this case, the binding which was commissioned is dark green velvet,
and it's embroidered in silk and with silver thread. In the centre of the upper board, which you can see, and the lower board as well,
there are two portraits of the Duke, which are worked in darning and satin stitches.
The Duke of Buckingham was assassinated at Portsmouth in August 1628,
so just three years after the book was produced.
And later the same year, it was presented to the University of Oxford, so to the Bodleian Library by one Lewis Roberts,
who was a London merchant. We don't know very much about him other than that he made this lovely donation to us.
We have the the accounts of the Library, which record that in 1631,
the Library paid one shilling for a green baize cover to protect the binding. The cover that we bought in 1631 has been lost,
but it probably accounts for the exceptional condition of this binding today.
You can see the colours, especially on the portrait, on the lower board, thank you Sarah,
are still very fresh indeed.
So the Bodleian never especially sought out embroidered bindings,
but we have nevertheless managed to accumulate around 80 embroidered bindings, which include tapestry and beaded bindings.
We do have a few continental European bindings, but the majority are English bindings, and most of them date from the 16th to 17th centuries,
in particular the early mid 17th century when these kinds of bindings were really fashionable.
This example is really unusual because it's on a secular work, almost all of our other early bindings are on Bibles and Psalters.
And if I can ask Sarah to swap for the next one.
Thank you, Sarah. This is another extraordinarily well-preserved example, from the Restoration this time.
This is a Bible, the printed work inside is dated 1660 and the volume has a fore-edge painting, which is dated 1662.
So we think it was bound around then. By this time, the fashion has changed and the embroidered bindings tend to be on white or pastel-coloured silk.
Oh thank you, Sarah. That's very brave of you. I don't know if people can see? Yes, it's coming out really well,
there's a lovely fore-edge painting under the gilt on the edge of the book there that you can see when you fan the book in that way,
but you can't see when the book is held closed. And the date there in the centre is 1662.
And that would have been done at the end of the binding, which is why we think the binding dates from around that time.
I was saying that the bindings tend to be now on white or pastel coloured silk rather than on velvet.
This binding is on pale blue silk, and it has this extraordinary raised embroidery and silver thread making an elaborate frame.
And on the upper board, the one that you can see now, the central lozenge has a portrait of Charles II.
And we've recently identified the possible source of this portrait as a painting of Charles by Peter Lely, which is now in the Royal Collection.
The portrait is really intricate. I think you can see down to the raised medallion on Charles's chest there.
It's extraordinarily detailed, and if I ask Sarah now to turn it over and show the lower board,
we will be able to see that there's a portrait of Charles II's Queen, Catherine of Braganza,
with a look of complete disdain on her face, I always think.
This portrait has also recently been identified as a painting by Dirck Stoop,
which is now in the National Portrait Gallery, and that painting was executed around 1660-1661,
and circulated in engravings in the early 1660s.
So that's likely how the embroiderer got hold of the image.
And if, Sarah, if you could hold the book at an angle so that we can see the depth of the of the raised work we'll be able to see
that this is absolutely not a reading copy.
One enquirer was asking about how the textiles related to how the books were used. The really delicate
portraits on this would be exactly where your fingers would want to grip the book if you were holding it open to read.
But it's also not a copy for shelving. If you tried to shelve this book in between other books that
delicate raised work with all of its very, very,
very fine beading and spangles and silver thread would catch on other books or would get crushed in between other books.
So really your only option if you're owning this book is to either carry it around in a bag -
and we know that some embroidered bindings are still associated with the bags that they were carried in -
or to have it on display on a cushion or similar in your home.
So they were items that were made to be admired rather than read, these are items of conspicuous consumption.
And textile bindings like this made great gifts because they were expensive.
They were exclusive because their tactile qualities made them really enjoyable to handle, and kind of ironically,
now we don't handle them with with bare hands.
We use gloves because of the metal threads in them.
We have in the collection an interesting piece of evidence actually about the sale of these books prior to the Civil War in the form
of a petition presented to Archbishop Laud in 1638 by milliners who sold fancy goods in the Royal Exchange.
So a new decree of the Star Chamber had made it punishable for anybody but members of the Stationers' Company to sell Bibles or Psalm books.
(Excuse me.) And this, the milliners point out in the petition, would be a great hardship for them,
as well as to the embroiderers who were working in their own homes to create these rare and curious embroidered covers.
It paints quite a vivid picture of these books on sale amongst the other luxuries available in the Royal Exchange.
And the milliners say in their petition that the Royal Exchange was a daily resort of the nobility and gentry
from all parts of the kingdom who came there to acquire the luxury goods. Ordinary booksellers,
on the other hand, never sold books bound this way.
It's quite tempting to hope that some embroidered bindings were made by amateur rather than professional embroiderers.
We know that Elizabeth I, when she was still a child, embroidered a binding on a manuscript given by Elizabeth to
her stepmother Catherine Parr, which we have in the Library, MS. Cherry 36.
I'm not going to show you that binding today, but I have got something intriguing. Sarah, could you change to the next binding, please?
I think this might be a candidate for a very well-executed
amateur embroidered binding. This is also on a Bible,
this one is dated 1643, so just towards the beginning of the English Civil War. That again is the date of the printed book,
we don't know for certain the date of the embroidered binding. You can see it's more modest than the previous binding.
There is some metal thread at the top and bottom of the portrait, but it's in general showing a great variety of stitches,
some of which are finer and some which are a little bit more,
I don't want to say heavy-handed because I'm not an embroiderer, but a little bit less fine, let's say.
So the ovals in this case
have portraits of women on both the upper and the lower boards.
This binding, like the last one, was... thank you, Sarah.
Yeah, if we could see the other one as well, that's great.
So you've got two women, one looking slightly to the left and one looking slightly to the right.
So this binding was owned by the great collector Albert Ermin, as was the last one.
We know that it was sold to him as showing two portraits of Charles I's
first wife, Henrietta Maria. Ermin didn't believe the association with Henrietta Maria.
and I have to say that I don't see a great likeness here to Henrietta Maria either.
Ermin thought that they were probably two different women,
in fact, not two portraits of the same woman and that although the two women are very alike he suggested that maybe they were sisters or even twins.
And I am inclined to agree. I failed to find a source for either of the portraits, but if anybody recognises them,
I'd love to hear more because it's a mystery who these Civil War era women are.
So I had a lot to choose from when I was preparing for this session.
And there are many, many, many things that I could have shown,
but I thought it would be nice to show something similar, but more-or-less completely different.
So the last thing that I've got to show you is
an item from our Artists' Books collection, and this is a very recent acquisition.
It was created in 2019 and acquired by us last year, and this is a book by the Iranian artist Batool Showghi,
and it's from her Immigration Series. Batool moved to the UK from Iran in 1985, and her work often deals with journeys of displacement.
She works in mixed media, as you can see, and she moves between painting, photography, illustration and uses a lot of textiles in her work as well.
This is a work. It's a concertina binding, so that it opens up to form a single sheet image.
And in this work, she's used a sewing machine as more or less a drawing tool.
It's more-or-less one continuous stitch with scraps of fabric trapped under the stitches
to create these really expressive and immediate portraits of immigrant mothers with their children.
And the text is written, handwritten by her in Farsi and describes the immigrants' thoughts,
their hopes for the future and despair for their situation. And the binding
here is the sleeve with a single portrait on the upper.
So that's it from me. I hope you enjoyed seeing some things that don't really very often come out into
the reading room because they're in such delicate condition that we're
really sadly not able to show them to as many people as would like to see them.
And that's something that we're getting increasing numbers of enquiries about.
So we hope to be able to do a lot more research and digitisation in the future to be able to share them more widely.
Thank you so much, Jo, and thank you, Sarah, as well,
The questions are flooding in, and the first one I have here is a fundamental one: who did the embroidery? And particularly, do we know
whether they were women doing the embroidery because traditionally women were more experienced and skillful at decorative needlework?
I think, so I am not a textile historian, but from everything I've read, I think not.
I think the professional embroiderers were by-and-large men.
There was a Guild of Embroiderers. And unless I'm very much mistaken, I think that they were forbidden from taking on female apprentices.
They were allowed to teach their own daughters only.
So all of their other mentees needed to be men.
So we know that Elizabeth I and Charles I both had books embroidered for them by the court embroiderers who were men.
And so, I think that the
professional embroidery, I think it was done by men. But I would be very happy to be corrected.
I'm sure correction may come, as we have a knowledgeable audience here.
But next question is: Do we have any book cushions in the collection that might have been used in conjunction with these bindings?
Would you have balanced these bindings on a book cushion?
And do we have any? We don't have any that I know of, unless you know of any, Martin, from the manuscript collection?
No, and I've never seen one, so. Thank you.
There's a comment - it's slightly derogatory - about the quality of the portraits on the panels.
They do indeed seem more primitive or even banal compared to the wonderful embroidery.
And there's a question about whether is there some sense in which the portrait might have
been done after the embroidery and only when a patron had been identified?
Or is this always a bespoke trade where you don't start unless you've already got the patron?
I think that's entirely possible. I think that the two
wouldn't necessarily have been done at the same time.
I think that the answer to that is that you would need a textile historian to tell you the answer. Sorry.
A very practical question, thank you,
about the challenges of keeping and conserving these books and indeed allowing people to study and read them.
What are the challenges? How do we do it? How do we enable people to study and read them? And how do we look after them?
Yes. How do we store them and how do we enable people to study them?
So in terms of storage, that's something that's changed and continues to change.
We used to use cotton gloves, which we don't do anymore.
We used to wrap them in wool, which we don't do anymore.
I think we're still finding a kind of a happy way of being able to handle them without damaging them. One of our embroidered bindings,
the one which is supposedly bound in part of Charles's waistcoat,
is now kept in a clear plastic box so that we can handle it without actually touching the binding.
One of the books, which we bought in the 1980s, has had a very, very,
very fine fabric mesh stitched over it so that it can be picked up and handled without anything kind of falling off.
I don't think either of those solutions are ideal from a reader consultation point of view because,
in the case with the box, you can't open the book at all.
I think most of the books that we have embroidered bindings on, we have other copies in more standard bindings as well.
So somebody that wants to consult the text wouldn't get kind of a surprise
embroidered binding in addition to their bit of textual investigation.
So sadly,
our option at the moment is to just limit the number of people that handle
them, to people that have a genuine research need to be able to see them.
Thanks, Jo. One final question before we let you off, just a very interesting one about the designs of the embroideries,
whether the designs come from other, you know, pattern books.
And are they shared with designs on embossed leather and other book bindings?
Or are they somehow related to costume?
Where do these designs come from?
We do have pattern books, but I haven't been able to marry up, we have two very rare 17th century English pattern books,
I haven't been able to marry up any of the designs on the bindings with the designs in the pattern books, very sadly.
I know that other bindings from other places,
they have been able to marry up designs with more widely printed images available on single prints and on botanical books, for example.
So more can be done to be able to find those things.
Thank you, Jo, ever so much.
Time presses and I'm going to have to cut off the questions there, just for the last section of our presentation,
this is, I think, the chance when I get to introduce myself.
But more to the point, if I can ask Andrew to return us to the PowerPoint presentation?
Thank you so much, Andrew. So just finally and very briefly, a look at the particular use of textiles in our medieval illuminated manuscripts.
This is a little book of prayers and devotions for Easter, made in the late
15th or early 16th century from the Cistercian Nunnery at Medingen in Germany.
And we've got it open here, obviously for this little piece of plain open weave cloth, hemmed with a red thread,
which we find here and which seems to be protecting an initial underneath it.
And Andrew, if you could move us on one? And we can immediately see that it's not attached to the page in any way, it's a loose piece of cloth.
It fulfils a protective function. But just thinking of the people who made it and used it. These were nuns who had themselves taken the veil.
And there's a natural, well, for these nuns,
needlework and embroidery was part of their daily existence and had a devotional aspect to it, as did the writing of books.
And we might also just remember the natural affinity between texts and textiles, 'textus' in Latin means woven.
And it was a medieval commonplace that texts were woven from the individual words.
Could we have the next, Andrew? This is a 14th century English psalter, a book of the Psalms. In this case, the curtain,
I think we can call it that, is attached to the page, it's sewn onto the page.
I don't know if this is clearly visible on people's screens, but it's made up of three separate pieces.
So it may well be a sort of recycled piece of cloth from a vestment or something.
It's clearly fulfilling a protective function just as we know that relics were
kept in textile bags and the textile emphasises the holiness of what's underneath.
And Andrew, if we move on, what it's protecting is a picture initial a historiated initial to Psalm 101,
one of the main liturgical divisions of the Psalms,
where we see King David kneeling at an altar and praying and the Lord appearing to him and blessing him out of the clouds above.
So this curtain has a sort of revelatory function, as well as a protective one,
just as we know that altarpieces often had curtains,
and those curtains might only be opened when mass was said at that altar in the church or chapel.
Andrew, the next one, please. That's the only curtain that survives in this manuscript but
here we can see the tell tale signs of another.
So in the margin here we can see bits of thread and some stitching holes.
So there were clearly other curtains in this book.
It's very difficult to date the textiles themselves and even more difficult, obviously, when they don't survive.
But we do have mediaeval references to these coverings, so we do know that it was certainly a mediaeval practise.
Andrew, the next, please.
Finally, this is a late 13th century English Psalter from Guisborough in Yorkshire, and we're not yet at the Psalms in the manuscript,
we're just at the beginning, and we've got a set of prayers to the five wounds of Christ on the cross.
And the image is obviously related to those prayers because we've got the crucifixion
with the Virgin Mary and Saint John on either side of the crucified Christ.
Andrew, if we could have the next, just to show, I think it was visible on the other side.
But here again, all the tell tale stitching holes which reveal that there were curtains in this manuscript,
and the more you look at illuminated manuscripts and look around the edges, you do see these these tell tale holes.
And so we begin to get an idea of how many of these curtains there were.
And Andrew, if we could go forwards, which is also back to our image, thank you.
Looking at the image again. We can see that it is damaged.
It's not randomly damaged.
There's no damage to the background and it's not, I think, hostile damage, because this isn't the effacement of a devil's face,
that kind of thing that we sometimes find. This, I think, is devotional damage.
It's concentrated on the Virgin Mary and Saint John. And anyone who's been into an Orthodox church today may not be too surprised,
because if you see the faithful entering an Orthodox church,
you'll see them either kissing an icon or kissing their fingers and then reaching out with their fingertips to touch the icon.
So I think this image has suffered devotional damage.
And so we have to imagine the role of the curtain in a kind of choreography of devotion here. The saying
of prayers and the lifting of the curtain are the prelude to a devotional act which links together the the prayer and the picture.
And so what I want to say. These textile curtains, there were more of them than we realise, they may well have had a protective role,
but most of all, I think they are precious evidence for the way in which the original owners used or interacted with these books,
which is a very different way from the more refined 'don't touch' art historical appreciation that we may approach them with today.
Thanks very much. Thank you so much, Martin, that was absolutely fantastic and very insightful.
We are actually at the end of the session, but if you're happy, we might go to the full panel and I could just ask a quick question to everyone.
I wonder, in the process of preparing for this talk or generally
in your recent work, whether you have been surprised by the amount of textiles in our collections?
Particularly for me, being involved in this project,
I have been surprised, with textiles as kind of my main focus and thinking again about where they appear in bindings,
but then in the other objects we have. I wonder if any of you have any thoughts about that?
Yes, they're everywhere. And actually, I forgot to point out as we passed in the 14th century Psalter that there are of course textile tabs,
which are very common in liturgical books to help you find the opening of a particular section of the text.
So yes, the more we think and look, the more textiles seem to leap out at us.
Yes. Sorry, go on, Andrew. I was just going to say, I mean, I echo that entirely.
We might have concentrated in the past on on a few sort of very sumptuous, very exceptional textiles.
But I think thinking more widely, we have them across our collections, both geographically and across time,
seemingly at every sort of point of different status across books and manuscripts.
So yes, they're everywhere, but for some reason we haven't
perhaps put two and two together before. But Jo? Yes, so I was going to say as part of this project, we are surveying embroidered bindings.
We've been telling people there were maybe 45 or 50 embroidered bindings and we found 80.
But in addition to that, we've got books printed on silk, books printed on cotton, printed on all kinds of fabric.
We've got samples of fabric brought back by Captain Cook from travels.
We've got samples of dyes. We've got things knitted out of catkins.
We've got all kinds of crazy things that we didn't know that we had.
So yes, it's been really exciting, very valuable work preparing for this.
Thank you so much, everyone. It's gone five o'clock, so I might wrap up the session if that's OK,
which I'd like to do by thanking you all for your fantastic presentations and for sharing all those objects and your thoughts and your insights.
I'd also like to thank the rest of the Conservation team and the Public Engagement team and Education teams here,
and Karen from the EMS team for supporting this talk and to T A Barron again for funding this series.
We very much hope that you will join us for the next talk in the Textiles and Library series, which will be on Thursday, the 25th of November,
and we'll be joined by Georgios Boudalis who will be exploring textiles and craft practises in Byzantine book
binding. Tickets for that talk and the rest of the series are free and still available through the booking website.
So please do check them out. And from me at the Bodleian again,
thank you very much for joining us and we hope to see you next time.