Lives of Lacemakers: About

Students at Bard Graduate Center developed this interactive display to offer a window into the lives of women and girls who created lace during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and whose names are no longer known to us. Informed by the surviving records related to lacemaking during this period, this exploration imagines the circumstances of three fictional young lacemakers: Lucia, who lives in Venice in 1660; Geneviève, who lives in Valenciennes, France, in 1750; and Kate, who lives in Bedfordshire, England, around 1780.

Click through to learn details about their families, lace education, local industries, tools and materials, daily lives, and cultures and communities.

Developed by Grace Billingslea, Caroline Elenowitz-Hess, and Isabella Margi.

Bibliography

Lucia

Allerston, Patricia. “An Undisciplined Activity? Lace Production in Early Modern Venice.” In Shadow Economies and Irregular Work in Urban Europe: 16th to Early 20th Centuries, edited by Thomas Buchner and Philip R. Hoffmann-Rehnitz, 63–71. Vienna: Lir Verlag, 2011.

Bhasin, Christine Scippa. “Prostitutes, Nuns, Actresses: Breaking the Convent Wall in Seventeenth-Century Venice.” Theatre Journal 66, no. 1 (March 2014): 19–35. https://doi.org/10.1353/tj.2014.0029.

Campagnol, Isabella. Forbidden Fashions: Invisible Luxuries in Early Venetian Convents. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014.

Datta, Satya Brata. Women and Men in Early Modern Venice: Reassessing History. London: Routledge, 2018

Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Labor and Lace: The Crafts of Giacomo Franco’s Habiti delle donne venetiane.” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 17, no. 2 (September 2014): 399–425.

Ray, Meredith K. “Letters and Lace: Arcangela Tarabotti and Convent Culture in Seicento Venice.” In Early Modern Women and Transnational Communities of Letters, edited by Julie D. Campbell and Anne R. Larsen. London: Routledge, 2009.

Geneviève

Guignet, Philippe. “The Lacemakers of Valenciennes in the Eighteenth Century: An Economic and Social Study of Female Workers under the Ancien Regime.” Textile History 10 (1979): 96–113.

Hufton, Olwen. “Women and the Family Economy in Eighteenth-Century France.” French Historical Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1975): 1–22.

“Valenciennes lace,” Textile Research Centre, accessed November 28, 2021, https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-needles/regional-traditions/europe-and-north-america/lace-types/valenciennes-lace.

Wilk, Stephen R. Sandbows and Black Lights: Reflections on Optics. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Kate

Earnshaw, Pat. The Identification of Lace. Princes Risborough, UK: Shire Publications, 1980.

Horn, Pamela. Routledge Library Editions: Rural History, Vol. 9, The Rural World 1780–1850: Social Change in the English Countryside. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1980.

Kennett, David H. “Lacemaking by Bedfordshire Paupers in the Late Eighteenth Century.” Textile History 5, no. 1 (1974): 111–18.

Oldfield, Geoffrey. “The Nottingham Lace Market.” Textile History 15, no. 2 (1984): 191–208.

Porter, Gerald. “‘Work the Old Lady out of the Ditch’: Singing at Work by English Lacemakers.” Journal of Folklore Research 31, nos. 1–3 (1994): 35–55.