Olson 2013

Olson, Rebecca. Arras Hanging: The Textile that Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013.

Introduction: Hiding in Plain Sight

"some of th e most foundational works of the English canon are more indebted to a preindustrial textile tradition than we hvae acknowledged" (1)

"Indeed, it would seem that weavers and writers had been inspiring one another in England, as they were in other European countries, for centures." (1)

"my focus is the way that texts could be, and were, read like tapestries." (2)

"Although long descriptions of wall hangings are common in medieval literature, with a few notable exceptions they seem to have fallen out of favor during the sixteenth century. Yet if sustained descriptions of tapestries are somwhat rare in Elizabethan literature and drama, tapestries are not." (3)

blank tapestries, undescribed tapestries == "helps us to think about what the materiality of an arras hanging -- indepdnent of its figures surface -- contributes to a literary or dramatic scene" (3)

"In the work of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser in particular the arras hanging often functions as a 'blank' or unfixed screen that invites readers and playgoers to project something highly idiosyncratci onto the text. They might, for example, imagine arras hangings they had seen in life, and in this way weave their own experiences into the fiction." (3)

tapestries as old technology -- books were new, tapestries were old, "moth-eaten" (5)

tapestries are "two-sided, three-dimensional, and vibrant works of art" (6)

"It would be hard to overstate the importance of tapestries in early modern England: theyw ere ubiquitous objects that could be found not only in courts and noble estates but also in schools, churches, and more humble homes across the nation." (6)

portability -- could be transported with the monarch, or used in state processions, when the streets of London were lined with arras

"The tapestries would have effectively blocked sunlight and draughts, which were presumed to be harmful, and they created a separation between th (male-dominated) world of the court and the queen's chamber, which was exclusively occupied by women." (7)

tapestries in queens's confinement chamber prior to Princess Margaret's birght in 1489 were devoid of imagery thought not convenient for pregnancy -- tapestries could move the emotions (7)

"Arras hanging were actually designed to be visually overwhelming and to present onlookers with an interpretive challenge: the fact that they were displayed to communicate political or didactic messages does not mean those messages were always obvious or straightforward. One of the issues that most interests me in this study is the extent to which viewing these vibrant, three-dimensional objects was a physically demanding experience." (9) -- different from miniaturesthat you looked closely at; instead stepped back, taking a number of perspectives

"Literary scholars therefor need to get byond the surface: when we treat tapestries in fiction as 'pictures,' we overlook, to our detriment, the fact that these textiles were large-scale, two-sided objects with which people physically interacted. This is important, because writers invoked the textile medium as a way to appeal to their audiences' desire for a hands-on and personal narrative experience." (13)

"This reciprocity between narrative and textile challenges what has assumed to be a competitive or paragonal relationship between written texts and visual art in post-Reformation England -- the so-called competition of the sister arts, in which artists would seek to demonstrate the dominance of their own mediums. The blank arras, even more than the ekphrastic arras, would seem to complicate this established theory. Rather than read the literary representation of an arras as the poet's attempt to prove the preeminence o verbal over visual representation, the representations of blank arras hangings in early modern fiction ultimately underscore the works' debt to, and dependence on, a nontextual mode of representation." (13)

Spenser, Chapman, Lyly -- "call attention to the pliability of language itself, and their own craftsmanship as weavers of words" (14)

"although the facade of the arras was used to uphold the patriarchal order of the court, English writers deliberately remind us that it also created a space for the satisfaction of personal desires. More often than not, the space was specifically associated with women's unsanctioned sexuality." (15)