Crafting Agency in Needle and Thread: Nuns' Work, Reform, and Textile Production in Late Medieval Monasteries

Women have long made textiles to navigate identity and exercise agency at revolutionary moments in history. To consider the powerful potential of the textile arts, psychoanalytical theories elucidate the ways in which the distaff, and the fiber arts more generally, has historically been a symbol of female agency and autonomy. To frame this project and investigate the history of scholarship about artworks produced by medieval nuns, I employ a critical historiographic method to explore the use of the enigmatic German term “Nonnenarbeit,” literally “nuns’ work.” After establishing the larger context of the historical relationship between women and textiles, I analyze three specific case studies, instances in which nuns took up the needle and thread at pivotal moments in the fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries. As expressions of their communal identity and agency in the wake of observant reform movements, nuns at Kloster Lüne stitched colorful klosterstich embroideries and Benedictines at St. Walburg in Eichstätt wove tapestries featuring the sisters and celebrating the history of the community. Birgittine nuns at Vadstena Abbey in southern Sweden gained metaphorical access to the Eucharist at the altar through embroidered silk altar frontlets and lavish reliquary containers, made in accordance with St. Birgitta of Sweden’s visionary new order. I apply postmodern theories such as Actor-Network Theory to leverage my interpretation of nuns’ networks at Kloster Lüne and St. Walburg, and Thing Theory to elucidate the materiality of the Birgittine embroideries. The technical proficiency of the textiles in my project has been well-established. Using critical theories and feminist methodologies, I add to the existing scholarship with an investigation into the revolutionary spirit of textile production in these women’s monasteries during the late Middle Ages.