1 - Touching with the Eye of The Mind: Eve, Textiles, and the Material Turn in Devotion

Summary

Behind the notion of a woman's touch lies the concept of woman as touch. This declares that, while men are inherently rational, women are all body, all feeling.

Women's close connection with textiles in the medieval West, as spinners, weavers, wearers, and bearers of fabric, was underpinned by a theological association between the feminine and the sensory. This connection was established in the earliest days of Christianity, and, in turn, Christianity located the roots of this tradition in the origins of the world: in Genesis’ portrayal of the archetypal female sinner, Eve. The quintessential Christian model of female transgression (or, even, of transgression as female), Eve was consistently used throughout the Late Antique and medieval periods to perpetuate a pejorative conception of women as what Constance Classen so succinctly and astutely describes in the epigraph to this chapter as ‘all body, all feeling’, a conception that flourished in opposition to the celebration of masculinity as ‘inherently rational’. The senses and sensory interpretation, as exemplified by Eve, led mankind towards transgression and sin. From within this misogynistic and restrictive framework, however, can be found the seeds of potential for another tradition: one that recognised that these sensory faculties could be used for the purposes of spiritual interpretation and enlightenment. And, time and time again, we find textiles and clothwork at the centre of this tradition.

The image of Eve as a clothworker is prevalent in, and even ubiquitous to, Christian art from the medieval period. Indeed, as Brian Murdoch explains, ‘Typically a biblical sequence might have the creation of the world, of Adam, of Eve from Adam's side, Adam naming the beasts, the temptation by the serpent, the expulsion, and then Adam and Eve at work, Adam digging the ground (as in Gen. 3: 23) and Eve with a distaff.’ We continually find images of Eve spinning incorporated within the Genesis narrative in medieval manuscript illuminations and Church artwork, and the roots of this iconography can, in fact, be traced back to early Christian art. The sarcophagus of Junius Bassus (d. 359), for example, in the crypt of St Peter's in the Vatican is carved with a depiction of God sending Adam to harvest the land, and Eve to spin wool (see Figure 1).