Female Devotion and Textile Imagery in Medieval English Literature

Uncovers the female voices, lived experiences, and spiritual insights encoded by the imagery of textiles in the Middle Ages.


For millennia, women have spoken and read through cloth. The literature and art of the Middle Ages are replete with images of women working cloth, wielding spindles, distaffs, and needles, or sitting at their looms. Yet they have been little explored.

Drawing upon the burgeoning field of medieval textile studies, as well as contemporary theories of gender, materiality,...