Horton-Insch, Millie Morag; (2024) Textiles, Gender, and Race in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Britain. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis undertakes a detailed art historical analysis of some of the small corpus of textiles which survive from eleventh- and twelfth-century Britain, objects which have been significantly overlooked in previous scholarship. In doing so it has sought to demonstrate what textiles can do for the study of early medieval art, eleventh- and twelfth-century Britain more broadly, and art histories of textile objects. Textiles, it argues, are productive objects of study precisely because of those reasons for which they have historically been marginalized: their poor survival prompting more creative interpretations of the limited corpus, the assumption that they were the made by English women enabling the study of these objects to contextualise that intersectional identity pointed to by contemporaneous written sources, and their failure to conform to stylistic taxonomies contributing to broader efforts at reconfiguring those categories which have proved problematic in early medieval studies (namely: Anglo-Saxon). This thesis does not seek to map gendered or racialised identities onto extant textiles, but instead describes how these objects may act as useful critical tools in assessing those sources which implicate them, and the intersectional gendered and racialised identity of the English woman with which they were associated, in the construction of that ‘imagined’ postconquest England. Demonstrated to be fundamentally dislocatory objects, this thesis will propose that textiles resist the fixity of stylistic taxonomies, compress time and space, and implicate the bodies of wearers and viewers within phenomenological understandings of the material world. Textiles will therefore be shown to be an appropriate material through which to acknowledge the complexities of shifting categories of identity in conquest-era Britain and how they have subsequently been motivated in modern and contemporary identitarian politics.

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