Memory, emotion and the lifecycle: Women and the production, ownership and dissemination of their textiles, 1660 - 1760

This research will explore women's emotional investment in the textiles they created, commissioned and maintained across their lifecycle. Women's textiles became physical embodiments of comfort, personal and social identity in the early modern period, impacting women's behaviour, thought and their experience of domestic space. Textiles represented emotions not only through the degree of imagination, labour and time taken to create and maintain them, but through the inclusion of repurposed fabrics imbued with memories of those to whom the materials had previously belonged.
Material objects have the potential to evoke and illustrate the negotiation of tensions among familial, friendship and community networks, through inclusion or exclusion in wills, or presentation as gifts. Women's reasons for and enjoyment in the creation, maintenance or modification of textiles also changed across their lifecycle. Examination of material objects from the period will illustrate how changes in ability, health, status and wealth imbued the textiles with varying emotions, including: anger, avarice, comfort, crisis, embarrassment, envy, fear, gratitude, hatred, intimacy, jealousy, pride, resentment, sorrow, and shame. This thesis will investigate how women's creation, ownership and dissemination of textiles across their lifecycle were experienced in differing ways.