Europe's Rich Fabric

The Consumption, Commercialisation, and Production of Luxury Textiles in Italy, the Low Countries and Neighbouring Territories (Fourteenth-Sixteenth Centuries)

Bart Lambert, Katherine Anne Wilson, Bart Lambert, Katherine Anne Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134795994
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

Throughout human history luxury textiles have been used as a marker of importance, power and distinction. Yet, as the essays in this collection make clear, the term 'luxury' is one that can be fraught with difficulties for historians. Focusing upon the consumption, commercialisation and production of luxury textiles in Italy and the Low Countries during the late medieval and early modern period, this volume offers a fascinating exploration of the varied and subtle ways that luxury could be interpreted and understood in the past. Beginning with the consumption of luxury textiles, it takes the reader on a journey back from the market place, to the commercialisation of rich fabrics by an international network of traders, before arriving at the workshop to explore the Italian and Burgundian world of production of damasks, silks and tapestries. The first part of the volume deals with the consumption of luxury textiles, through an investigation of courtly purchases, as well as urban and clerical markets, before the chapters in part two move on to explore the commercialisation of luxury textiles by merchants who facilitated their trade from the cities of Lucca, Florence and Venice. The third part then focusses upon manufacture, encouraging consideration of the concept of luxury during this period through the Italian silk industry and the production of high-quality woollens in the Low Countries. Graeme Small draws the various themes of the volume together in a conclusion that suggests profitable future avenues of research into this important subject.

PART I
Consumption of Luxury Textiles

1
'In the chamber, in the garde robe, in the chapel, in a chest': The Possession and Uses of Luxury Textiles. The Case of Later Medieval Dijon

Katherine Anne Wilson

Three examples of inventories surviving in the collection of the marie de Dijon and dating from the end of the fourteenth century serve to remind us of the range of luxury textiles that were possessed by wealthy urban inhabitants in the Later Middle Ages and the variety of uses to which they could be put.¹ The first, from 1392 and of the mercer Etienne Marchant, details over a thousand objects destined for sale to customers of Dijon as well as his and his wife’s personal possessions.² Included among these were several ounces of different coloured silks and robes of cameline.³ The second, from 1395, records the possessions of Regnault Chevalier, tailor to the duke of Burgundy ⁴ .Among his household objects we find several houppelandes of green, black and white satin, a cloth of gold worked with the image of My Lord, and a cushion of silk. ⁵ The third inventory, from 1434 and of Jaquote Martin, bourgeois of Dijon, documents a black and red silk pillow of satin and seven old squares of tapestry.⁶ The Dijon inventories are part of a much wider corpus of sources from the Later Middle Ages that include references to luxury textiles. References to silks and tapestry have been used to illustrate broader transformations that occurred in later medieval European consumer demand, particularly increased demand for a greater range of material goods. For England, Wendy Child’s assessment of English custom accounts during the fourteenth century has demonstrated that a wider market for silks, brocades and velvets was opening up. 7 Crossing to mainland Europe, a similar market for silks and tapestry appears evident. In the Low Countries we begin to see a wider range of silk and tapestry products materialising in testaments and inventories of urban inhabitants, as covers for household furnishings such as bench covers, cushions and beds and also as accessories for clothing.⁸ While tapestry production had been a recognised speciality of these territories from the fourteenth century onwards, these lands also witnessed a move to the production of imitation silks in the later fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.⁹ Françoise Piponnier has pointed to a wider availability of silk products in later medieval France, again from furnishings to belt embellishments, while tapestry producers and merchants were both resident and operating from Paris from at least the end of the thirteenth century, and production of silks was established in Tours by the end of the fifteenth century and then in Lyon by the sixteenth.¹⁰ Given that the majority of silks were still produced and exported by Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the variety of silk products found in Italy, from silk clothing and furnishings to silk embellishments for small purses and belts, is perhaps unsurprising.¹¹ Tapestry products were evident in greater numbers there too, again as cushions, bench covers, and bed and wall hangings, and several Italian rulers such as the Gonzaga in Mantua sought to acquire tapestry weavers from the Low Countries during the fifteenth, and into the sixteenth, century.¹²

While the growth in silks and tapestry available for a wider consumer base across Western Europe is relatively well documented, there has been relatively little exploration of the possession and use of these high-quality textiles. Françoise Piponnier’s work, while including many examples of silks from the Dijon inventories, is broad in its scope, designed to guide the reader through wider changes in silk use and ownership in France. Furthermore, Piponnier’s other work on the Dijon inventories, which includes extremely valuable work on cloth merchant’s inventories, residential spaces recorded by the inventories, clothing and ceramic ownership, has never been brought together, nor does it completely set the evidence from the inventories in the context of Dijon as a commercial or consumer centre, or fully explore the biographies of individuals recorded by these documents. 13 To understand patterns of consumption it is necessary to consider discrete centres, single consumers and their careers, and investigate whether these ‘luxury’ textiles were in fact considered as a luxury by later medieval consumers and what implications this has for the growing attraction of consumers to these products during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The silks and tapestry of the inhabitants of the town of Dijon represent significant opportunity to examine the possession and use of ‘luxury’ textiles. Several thousand inventories survive for Dijon and its surrounding area from the final years of the fourteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. 14 The worth of the collection has been highlighted on more than one occasion over the past thirty years, but little recent work has been undertaken on these documents. 15 While inventories have well-documented limitations as a historical source, in that many may omit a complete list of an individual’s possessions, fail to give valuations for the objects described, or tend predominantly to reflect the middling or upper ranks of society, they nevertheless remain a valuable tool for examining the possession and use of objects. In the case of the Dijon inventories, the clerk frequently records the rooms and then lists the objects of each room. At times, monetary values assigned to possessions by assessors and witnesses are recorded, and occasionally some of the rooms or objects are given personal descriptions. Finally, the inventories can be set in the context of the extensive work undertaken by Pierre Geoffroy, Henri Dubois and Thierry Dutour among others, on the notables of the town in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from the collections of notarial documents, tax records and household accounts of the dukes of Burgundy, which facilitates a reconstruction of Dijon commercial life and society as a context for the possession and use of luxury textiles.¹⁶

Four methods of investigation are proposed by this chapter to begin unpicking the possession and use of luxury textiles of the inhabitants of later medieval Dijon. First, Dijon will be considered as a centre of retail and luxury activity, a place where silks and tapestries could be traded, purchased, possessed, displayed and re-used. Second, the biographies of some of the owners of silks and tapestry in Dijon will be outlined. Third, the spaces silks and tapestries were used, and the ways in which they might have been distinguished from other objects listed alongside them in the inventories by their use, position or terminology, will be explored. Finally, a problematic issue will be addressed – why silks and tapestry were possessed and used by these inhabitants and if they were considered to be a ‘luxury’. Christopher Dyer has suggested that luxury objects may be defined by the fact that they ‘conferred status on those who used them, brought people of similar standing together, and excluded those who did not belong’.¹⁷ In light of his definition, do the Dijon references to these textiles and the spaces in which they were used in any way suggest that these items were valued through the quality of the product or through their symbolic value, contributing to the perception of the textile as a luxury object?

Where: Dijon as a Commercial Centre

The town of Dijon in the Later Middle Ages is commonly described in terms of its relationship to the dukes of Burgundy, and during the rule of Philip the Bold (1363–1404) as one of the centres for Burgundian administration. ¹⁸ When the terms ‘commercial’ or ‘consumer centre’ are applied to Dijon, these are applied to early modern Dijon, under the control of the French crown. James Farr has done much to rehabilitate sixteenth and seventeenth century Dijon as a centre worthy of the attentions of French urban historians. ¹⁹ His vision of a thriving centre of commerce and consumption can also be convincingly applied to later medieval Dijon. Instead of the neglected provincial centre of the Burgundian dukes, Dijon can be reimagined as a hub of retail activity, a place where a variety of luxury textiles were possessed, benefiting from its dual role as a regional centre and from its close links with the Burgundian household. Henri Dubois’s description of the town as a ‘place of passage’ neatly encapsulates its geographical situation on a major trade route North (Paris and the centres of the Low Countries) from the East and South (Germany and Italy).²⁰ The producers and retailers of the centre were able to tap into a populous town and hinterland. Dijon had an estimated population of around 11,000 in 1390, increasing to about 12,000 by 1450. ²¹ In the bailiwick of Dijon, which covered a large area outside of the town, some further 32,000 people resided.²² Several surviving cartularies and guild...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures and Plates
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Luxury Textiles in Italy, the Low Countries and Neighbouring Territories (Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries): A Conceptual Investigation
• PART I: CONSUMPTION OF LUXURY TEXTILES
• PART II: COMMERCIALISATION OF LUXURY TEXTILES
• PART III: PRODUCTION OF LUXURY TEXTILES
• Centres, Peripheries and the Performative Textile: By Way of Conclusion
• Index