I'm thinking of tapestries like, for example, the Unicorn tapestries. These large complex objects are not one-person jobs. If I had to guess, I'd guess that they were designed by men, but the actual weaving was done by women. That guess is based on general gender-role stereotypes, but also on the fact that that was the division of labor in the Disney studios of the 'classical' era: the images were designed and animated by men, but the inking and painting of the cells was done by women.
So, I'd conjecture that the division of labor in a medieval tapestry studio was the same. FWIW, the drawing used to transfer the artist's designe to the tapestry loom is called a cartoon.
Labour was controlled by weavers and dyers Guilds.
ReplyDeleteGuilds generally excluded females from membership with a few exceptions.
Interesting.
ReplyDeleteOff topic other than I have been looking at craft activity in relation to other matters.
ReplyDeleteStrayed across a reference to you're historical counterpart in the 12th century "the trompros" a class of Jongleur.
Few pages on sex, dance, horn-blowing and 12th century philosophy. Along with some pictures.
Monsters, Corporeal Deformities, and Phantasms in the Cloister of St-Michel-de-Cuxa
Thomas E. A. Dale
On Jstor. Rather interesting.
I know trumpeting was guild-controlled. In fact, I believe there were two guilds. If you played the upper register you belonged to one guild; low register players were in another guild. Of course, you couldn't stray into the other guild's register.
ReplyDeleteI don't know very much about later Guilds but that does not surprise me.
ReplyDeleteWhat Dale seems to be referring to does not look very different on first glance from Ireland between the 6th and the 12th in legal codes.
A new ideological broom is re-ordering the position and status of things on a legal basis. So you find the Druid (not the one of popular imagination) who was a top flight member of the elite, ranked alongside, low grade satirists, farters, musicians and prostitutes and described attending parties of the un-dead (as opposed to ritual events staged by the sons of life i.e the priest)
Perhaps a tough act to impose as the parties sound quite fun.