CALL FOR PAPERS
CALL FOR PAPERS
Joint project: University of Naples L’Orientale – Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse
The Virgin’s chemise at Chartres Cathedral (9th century), the fabrics used as support for his paintings by Luca Pignatelli (1962–) or employed by Ann Hamilton (1956–) in her installations, and textile architecture are only a few examples of how fabrics can step out of their typical functions (e.g. as daily clothing, drapery, etc.) to enter the arts and the collective imagination in rather unique ways. Evidence of textile technology dates back to the Palaeolithic (Bender Jørgensen et al., 2023) and, according to Leonardo da Vinci, it was a craft ‘second [only] to the printing of letters’ and ‘more beautiful and subtle in invention’. If artifice has traditionally aimed at producing something ‘rare’ as opposed to ‘common’ (at least until the advent of plastic according to Roland Barthes [1972: 98]), textiles are among the artefacts through which the aspiration to create rarity has been best expressed throughout the centuries. The invention of weave patterns and dyeing techniques as well as printing pattern design prove that in the production of textiles — as indeed in all crafts according to Richard Sennett — “thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making” (Sennett 2008: 7).
This joint interdisciplinary conference follows up on a conference hosted by the Università L’Orientale – Naples on 10–13 September 2025. It focuses on the interaction between the material and the immaterial aspects of the craft of weaving, approached from various angles, in the early modern period. The aim is to explore aspects of the interactions between textile manufacturing and its products and the individual or collective imagination, intellectual life as well as the ‘world picture’ and mental representations in the early modern period. Those interactions, although sometimes acknowledged, appear to have been understudied so far. How did the immaterial life of ideas as well as the cultural context impact on the creation of fabric designs? And, vice versa, how did textile manufacturing, in either its pre-industrial or early industrial stage, impact on the personal or collective imagination? How were early modern textile artefacts, alongside the material conditions and early modern technologies of their production, perceived by contemporaries? Were they perceived as ‘symbolic capital’, in Pierre Bourdieu’s acceptation (1979)? Can the study of representations, descriptions, references or even allusions to textiles and the textile manufacture, but also of the metaphorical usage of textile-related vocabulary in various texts – from poetry to philosophical essays – or of references to the textile world in the early modern visual arts – paintings, sketches, illustrations, plates – add to our knowledge of the early modern episteme?
The dates 1589–1801 have been chosen for their significance in the progress of textile manufacturing, but papers focusing on any period of time from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century are welcome. 1589 was the year when William Lee invented the stocking frame knitting machine in England; only a few years later, at the beginning of the seventeenth century in Paris, the Gobelins manufactory was established. 1801 was the year when the Jacquard loom was first introduced; Charles Babbage’s ‘difference engine’, the early calculating machine designed and partially built during the 1820s and 1830s, was inspired by the use of punched cards in the Jacquard loom (see Essinger 2004), which testifies to the potential of textile-related creativity. Could there be more, still unknown, regions of cross-fertilisation between textile manufacturing and other realms of knowledge?
The conference welcomes interdisciplinary contributions at the crossroads of, but not limited to, the following fields: cultural history, social history, microhistory, history of ideas or intellectual history, history of technology, philosophy, linguistics, literary studies, material studies, visual arts studies, crafts, aesthetics, memorial studies, and intermedial studies. Particular attention is given to archival research and microhistorical approaches, recalling Carlo Ginzburg’s statement that ‘the prefix “micro” is related to the microscope, so to an analytic approach to history’ (Ginzburg 2015). This analytical approach is extended to the study of texts and images in order to analyse the cultural impact of the textile world on early modern intellectual imagination.
Another area of investigation concerns the visual culture of textile production: drawings, sketches or paintings representing textile manufactures and their workers, manufacturing processes, early modern manuals or handbooks about textile production, and their possible illustrations. The conference also explores the connections between textiles and book-making in early modern Europe, including the intersection between textile manufacturing and book-printing. Textile metaphors, extensively used by philosophers and writers, operated at once ‘as language, concept and matter’ (Dormor 2020: 1), and early modern texts have sometimes been read like tapestries (Olson 2013).
Further questions concern the experience of textile workers themselves: their relationship to their craft, the possible presence of creativity and imagination within routine labour, and the traces they may have left behind in notebooks, sketches or other documents. Inspired by microhistory and “history from below”, the conference seeks to uncover new perspectives on the circulation of ideas embedded in textile production, design and technology.
A special, site-specific section focuses on the parallel development of textile manufacturing in San Leucio (near Caserta) and Mulhouse during the second half of the eighteenth century. The silk factory at San Leucio, established by Ferdinand of Bourbon in the former hunting lodge, and the cotton-printing industry in Mulhouse, which became known as the “French Manchester”, offer two emblematic cases for studying the cultural, social and imaginative impact of textile industries. Papers may also address the memory of these industries today, through museums, heritage practices and cultural activities.
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