La couture et la broderie sont deux activités qui ont marqué, pendant des siècles, la présence féminine à l’intérieur de la famille. Parfois geste technique et nécessaire, parfois moment de formation et/ou d’évasion, la broderie a d’ailleurs constitué l’un des savoir-faire nécessaires pour la jeune fille bourgeoise vouée au mariage, nécessitant, pour l’affirmation de sa présence sociale, un trousseau. Par ailleurs, pendant ces derniers siècles, les femmes se sont emparées de l’écriture pour en faire à la fois un moment de (...) réflexion, de gestion, de mémoire de soi et de la famille : en quoi ces pratiques se ressemblent-elles? En quoi la solitude, le repli sur soi, le silence, la lenteur, la précision du geste, le marquage (du papier, du tissu) deviennent, tout le long du xixe siècle, les éléments communs de savoir-faire qui contribuent de façon analogue à forger, dans l’espace et dans le temps, l’identité individuelle féminine et son insertion sociale? En quoi l’écriture de soi a accompagné, puis remplacé, le travail de l’aiguille? (shrink)

La couture et la broderie sont deux activités qui ont marqué, pendant des siècles, la présence féminine à l’intérieur de la famille. Parfois geste technique et nécessaire, parfois moment de formation et/ou d’évasion, la broderie a d’ailleurs constitué l’un des savoir-faire nécessaires pour la jeune fille bourgeoise vouée au mariage, nécessitant, pour l’affirmation de sa présence sociale, un trousseau. Par ailleurs, pendant ces derniers siècles, les femmes se sont emparées de l’écriture pour en faire à la fois un moment de (...) réflexion, de gestion, de mémoire de soi et de la famille : en quoi ces pratiques se ressemblent-elles? En quoi la solitude, le repli sur soi, le silence, la lenteur, la précision du geste, le marquage deviennent, tout le long du xixe siècle, les éléments communs de savoir-faire qui contribuent de façon analogue à forger, dans l’espace et dans le temps, l’identité individuelle féminine et son insertion sociale? En quoi l’écriture de soi a accompagné, puis remplacé, le travail de l’aiguille? (shrink)

Images abound of women throughout the ages engaging in various activities. But why are there so few representations of childbirth in visual art? Feminist artist Judy Chicago once suggested that depictions of women giving birth do not commonly occur in Western culture but can be found in other contexts such as pre-Columbian art or societies previously considered "primitive." Chicago's own exploration of the theme resulted in the creation of The Birth Project (1980-85): an unprecedented series of eighty handcrafted works of (...) art created in a variety of needlework techniques by more than 130 artisans that celebrate the experience of birth and a woman's transformation into motherhood. But why is The Birth Project an aberration from today's norm? What are the reasons that childbirth remains a taboo subject in our visual culture? Why is the birthing experience--so pervasive for women--so infrequently celebrated, even by female artists? (shrink)

The article presents three little-known poems of the Lithuanian poet and diarist of the first half of the nineteenth century, Gabriela Puzynina. The seemingly trivial subject related to knitting needlework and conventional form of the poems gain a new value, if considered in the context of sociology and anthropology literature. The analysis, beyond the traditional genre study, are subject to the following issues: the poet as a distinct entity and her membership to women’s environment, the process of building the (...) women’s identity, everyday life and its literary reflection, material culture in the comparison with the anthropocentric approach of the past. There is also raised a question about the way of reception such an occasional literature today. According to the author of the article, reading Puzynina’s poems only as “the literary trifles” wrongfully condemned them to oblivion, yet they are interesting and credible testimony of historical time and a medium for exploring the individual human life from the past. (shrink)

Embroidery is a part of the needlework that is one of the four virtues of women in ancient times, including “appearance, speech, needlework and behavior”. (Chen Baoliang, 2004) The education of women in old times mainly focused on the "feminine virtues" and "needlework". Due to cultivation at an early age, the upper-class women were mostly clever and intelligent, and did not have to earn their own living. Because of the restraints of the traditional society, they could not (...) devote too much of their time and energy to the technical improvement of the needlework. The embroidery works of women in the Ming and Qing dynasties, however, show different characteristics from that of the previous age. They skillfully adopted the ideas of old masters, and with continuation and development, they showed signs to separate embroidery from traditional needlework, eventually making it into an independent art. (shrink)

Several years ago, in a brilliant contribution to the Collection Archives Series, Michel de Certeau wove together a large number of seventeenth-century documents pertaining to the famous episode of demonic possession among the Ursuline nuns of Loudun.1 One of the principal ways in which de Certeau organized his disparate complex materials into a compelling narrative was by viewing the extraordinary events as a kind of theater. There are good grounds for doing so. After all, as clerical authorities came to acknowledge (...) the incidents of possession and treat them accordingly, they ceased to be isolated, private events occurring inside the convent walls and were transformed instead into public spectacles performed for a populace deeply divided between Catholics and Huguenots. Once or twice a day the nuns were taken from their needlework or tranquil meditations and led in small groups through the streets of the town to a church or chapel, where spectators had already gathered. At first these spectators were local townspeople, many of whom must have been acquainted with or even related to the nuns, but, as word of the possession spread, crowds of the curious arrived not only from the region but from all over France and from as far away as England and Scotland. The inns of the town were filled with these visitors who traveled to Loudun expecting to witness events there that were at once beyond nature and yet performed on schedule: repeatable, predictable, and—in their bizarre way—decorous.At the appointed times, beneath the expectant gaze of the crowd, the possessed women would ascend a scaffold, be loosely tied to low chairs, and begin to manifest their symptoms. From within each of the tormented bodies, a particular devil would arise and be constrained by the exorcist to identify himself. If a nun were possessed by more than one demon, the exorcist could dismiss one supernatural voice and demand that another come forth and occupy the tongue of the writhing woman. If the demon refused to cooperate in the interrogation, the presiding priest would solemnly remove the Holy Sacrament from the pyx and hold it up to the mouth of the possessed while the priests and spectators would assist by chanting the Salve Regina. This would provoke screams and violent contortions. Submitting to irresistible spiritual pressure, the devil would then be compelled to speak, confirming the Christian mysteries and the power of the Catholic church. “On stage,” writes de Certeau, “there are no longer human beings; in this sense, there is no longer anyone—only roles” . And these “roles” in turn are revealed to be the hidden truths that underlie the masks of ordinary life; more accurately, the ceremony has the power to convert ordinary life into mere masks, precisely so that these masks may be stripped away to reveal the inward drama of spiritual warfare. The demons appear at first to dominate that drama, forcing their wretched and unwilling hosts to manifest the power of darkness, but a spectacular ecclesiastical counterforce transforms the tragedy into a comedy in which the devil confesses that he has been vanquished by Jesus Christ. 1. See Michel de Certeau, La Possession de Loudun, Collection Archives Series, no. 37 ; all further references to this work, abbreviated PL, will be included in the text . On the relationship between exorcism and theater in this period, see also Henri Weber, “L’Exorcisme à la fin du seizième siècle, instrument de la Contre Réforme et spectacle baroque, » Nouvelle revue du seizième siècle 1 : 79-101. Stephen Greenblatt, the Class of 1932 Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a founder and editor of Representations. His most recent book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, received the British Council Prize in the Humanities. He is presently completing a study of Shakespeare and the poetics of culture. “Marlow, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1978 issue. (shrink)

The progressive art guide - an entirely new method of self-instruction on modern arts, shown in their progressive stages of completion is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1888. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. (...) Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future. (shrink)