In the eye of the beholder: 'Seeing' textiles in the early modern interior

Abstract

This article explores the physical, cultural and aesthetic conditions for perceiving textiles in early modern England, in order to reconstruct contemporary responses to them. It begins by arguing for the level of explicitness of the engagement with the senses in printed materials on this subject. Focusing on sight, it then considers the depictions of the senses in the interior design at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire, and Knole, Kent, in relation to religious and moral ideas about the ‘eye of faith’, to Humanist representations of sight as a sense associated with women and to the élite mastery of the senses. The article then opens the subject out to consider different ways of ‘seeing’ textile furnishings in this period and the kind of visual responses they invited — it explores fading eyesight and looking glasses, times of day and mirrors. Finally, it suggests that textile objects functioned as perks and as evidence of loyalty and proximity to the Crown, and points to the lack of distinction between new and second-hand pieces, even among high-ranking members of society, and to the sight and appreciation of inventory makers whose descriptions give access to their sense of the most obvious features of textiles, most notably colour and lustre.

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ORCID for Maria Hayward: orcid.org/0000-0002-3299-4383

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