Pair of gloves

Public Access Description:

This pair of gloves was one of 13 objects investigated from 2015-2019 as part of ‘Gender, Power and Materiality in Early Modern Europe’ and ‘Gendering Interpretations’: two collaborative projects between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia.

The ubiquity of gloves as an early modern fashion accessory in Europe resulted in demand for North American deerskins, from which leather was made. The deerskin trade reshaped gender relations among the Creek Native Americans who supplied the skins: it changed men’s hunting practices, separating men from women for longer periods, and encouraged European men to seek marriage with Native American women for its strategic trade advantages.

Since all genders wore gloves in early modern Europe, and floral decoration like this was not gender-specific, it is particularly difficult to work out which gender a pair of gloves was made for. Gloves were often scented, and the smell would have had gendered connotations which are lost to us today.

Gloves enabled people to make significant gestures, which differed depending on gender. Women could seduce by dropping gloves, and men could challenge each other by throwing down a glove or using it to strike an opponent across the face. Similarly, the wearing or removal of gloves affected the erotic dynamics of male-female relationships.

These gloves have tapestry-woven gauntlets. Although they have been historically attributed to the Sheldon tapestry workshops, it may be more likely that they were produced by one of the many small weaving workshops operated in London by Flemish weavers, who were refugees from religious violence. Women were excluded from the weaving of cloth with large looms on the basis of their size and strength, but would still have been able to weave small-scale tapestry decoration like these gauntlets.

Curatorial comment:

This pair of gloves was one of 13 objects investigated from 2015-2019 as part of ‘Gender, Power and Materiality in Early Modern Europe’ and ‘Gendering Interpretations’: two collaborative projects between the V&A, University of Plymouth, Vasa Museum (Stockholm), Lund University, Leiden University and the University of Western Australia. These projects aimed to recover the complex gender dynamics that made objects meaningful to early modern people, and to increase the visibility of women and LGBTQ people in museum collections. Research on gloves as a material locus of gender and power was carried out by Professor James Daybell, Professor Svante Norrhem, Professor Susan Broomhall, Professor Jacqueline Van Gent and Dr Nadine Akkerman. Research on the V&A objects was carried out by Dr Kit Heyam.

In addition to the findings noted in the Public Access Description, research on this object revealed the following:

The materials with which gloves were decorated relied on women’s labour, often poorly paid. Early modern commentators were aware that the cost-effectiveness of the silk industry, which supplied embroidery thread, was enabled by the cheap labour of women and children, who harvested and unwound the cocoons. Similarly, wool-spinning enabled women to make a meagre living, but also carried ideological significance: women were encouraged to spin whether or not they needed to financially, since it was associated with virtuous productivity. However, wealthier women such as Catherine de Medici and Anne of Denmark were important investors in the silk industry.

Women were officially excluded from glovemaking guilds across Europe, though exceptions were made for widows as in other trades, and evidence suggests that some girls were apprenticed as glovers. However, the tapestry-woven gauntlets of these gloves may have provided another outlet for women’s work. Hilary L. Turner’s extensive research on the Sheldon tapestry workshops argues convincingly that the large number of attributions to these workshops – including these gloves – is often unreliable and rarely evidence-based. Instead, many of the ‘Sheldon’ tapestry items were likely produced by Flemish emigrés in small London workshops. The presence of these weavers is mainly detectable through baptism and marriage records, meaning that women are largely only visible as mothers and wives. However, there are exceptions: for example, Margaret Knutte employed three men in a weaving workshop, and Thomas the Fleming, left his weaving business and tools to his wife and two daughters. The male weavers also developed homosocial bonds with each other, as shown by Thomas White’s bequest to ‘his gossips’, Thomas Clarke and Richard Lokes.

Among the uses of gloves mentioned elsewhere, gloves also functioned as gifts at court and at weddings, and could be used as receptacles for secret messages. In one notable 1582 example, Lady Fernihurst delivered a letter concealed in her gloves to James VI of Scotland. The letter was one of a series sent by Esmé Stuart, Earl of Lennox, with whom contemporaries accused James of being in a sexual and romantic relationship: while some writers condemned this, others presented their relationship sympathetically using the tropes of medieval romance.

(Dr Kit Heyam, August 2019)

References:

Key references

• James Daybell, Svante Norrhem, Susan Broomhall, Jacqueline Van Gent and Nadine Akkerman, ‘Gender and Materiality in Early Modern English Gloves’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 52/3 (2021), 571-606
• James Daybell, ‘The Early Modern Glove, Gender and Emotional Objects’ in Gender, Materiality, and Politics: Essays in the Making of Power, ed. by Anna Nilsson Hammar, Martin, Daniel Nyström and Martin Almbjär (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2022), pp. 217-234.
• John F. Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2005)
• Hilary L. Turner, ‘The Tapestries Called Sheldon’ http://www.tapestriescalledsheldon.info/index.html

Further reading

• Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1919)
• Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women's Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)
• Hilary L. Turner, ‘The Tapestry Trade in Elizabethan London: Products, Purchasers, and Purveyors’, The London Journal, 38:1 (2013), 18-33
• Hilary L. Turner ‘Finding the Sheldon Weavers: Richard Hyckes and the Barcheston Tapestry Works Reconsidered’, Textile History, 33:2 (2002), 137-161
• Hilary L. Turner, ‘Tapestries Once At Chastleton House And Their Influence On The Image Of The Tapestries Called Sheldon: A Reassessment’, The Antiquaries Journal, 88 (2008), 313-46
• A.J.B.Wace, ‘A pair of gloves with tapestry-woven gauntlets’, Embroideress, 42 (1932), 990-994