Renaissance Textiles

This volume presents the first collection of essays dedicated to women as producers of visual and material culture in the Early Modern European courts, offering fresh insights into the careers of, among others, Caterina van Hemessen, Sofonisba Anguissola, Luisa Roldán, and Diana Mantuana. Also considered are groups of female makers, such as ladies-in-waiting at the seventeenth-century Medici court. Chapters address works by women who occupied a range of social and economic positions within and around the courts and across media, including paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles. Both individually and collectively, the texts deepen understanding of the individual artists and courts highlighted and, more broadly, consider the variety of experiences of female makers across traditional geographic and chronological distinctions. The book is also accompanied by the Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts digital humanities project (www.globalmakers.ua.edu), extending and expanding the work begun here.

The Greek clergy as the Ottoman Christian elite and de facto part of the Imperial bureaucracy naturally preferred the fabrics which better communicated its position to the wider community. For this reason Ottoman silks and velvets enjoyed the first place in the Church’s preferences. From the surviving material we understand that the other two textile productions which competed for the second place were the Italian and Persian. While Persian silks were popular , Italian fabrics enjoyed far more prestige in Ottoman society as one of the elite products consumed by the court . In this paper we will analyze the use of Italian fabrics by the Greek Church as an element of Ottoman elite culture, the dialogue between Ottoman and Italian fabrics within ecclesiastical context and the fusions that this dialogue created.