Textual and textile literacies in early modern braids

This article considers the handicraft of braiding, a variety of textile work in which loops of silk were placed on the fingers and interwoven to make strings containing patterns, motifs or alphabetic characters, usually formed into posies. The practice often involved the collaboration of multiple participants and is documented extensively in thirteen seventeenth‐century manuscripts, which present written directions, usually alongside worked examples. Largely overlooked in recent studies of women's handiwork, braiding and braids appear to have been pervasive in early modern culture: they are invoked directly and indirectly in a variety of contemporary texts which emphasize that they possessed social, cultural and political meaning. This article argues that braiding constitutes a complex model of expression and social production, which sets alphabetic content alongside the rich significance of form, pattern, material and collaborative bodily practice. Drawing out connections between braiding and varieties of poetic composition in a range of other writings, I emphasize that braids blur distinctions between textual and textile literacies and indicate a need to rethink the relationship of the needle and the pen.