Myths of Weaving: Writing About Textiles in Ancient and Late Antique Literature

My special treat this winter vacation is to finish writing a series of posts about books* I read in the 2022-2023 academic year. That was full year and blogging took a backseat to my many other adventures. As I continue to settle into postdoc life, I'm hoping to keep using this blog as a commonplace book for my academic and creative life. I greatly enjoy the writing I do here and hope to continue it into a brave new year!

One of the books I finished last year was Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins. At the time I was reading it, September to December 2022, I was beginning to work on the use of textile metaphors in late antique literature for two conference papers that have since become two book chapters. Hence, references to textile production snagged my attention even when reading books for fun. Making textiles provides a through-thread for Higgins' retelling of Greek myths, and the passage of the introduction where she explains this is worth quoting in full:

'Running through Greek and Roman thought is a persistent connection between the written word and woven thread, between text and textile. The Latin verb texere, from which the English words text and textile derive, means to weave, or compose, or to fit a complex structure together. Textum means fabric, or framework, or even, in certain branches of materialist philosophy, atomic structure. The universe itself is sometimes describes as a kind of fabric: Lucretius, in his first-century BCE scientific poem On the Nature of the Universe, describes the Earth, sea and sky as three dissimilar elements that are texta, woven together. Texere is related to the Greek verb tikto, which means to engender, to bring about, to produce, to give birth to. In turn the Latin and Greek words are related to the Sanskrit takman, child, and taksh, to make or to weave. Greek and Roman literature is full of metaphors that compare its own creation to spinning and weaving...My book reassess the connectedness of all of this: text and textile, the universe, the production of ideas, the telling of stories, and the delicate filaments of human life. These are the lives that are so cunningly and ruthlessly manipulated by the Fates, the all-powerful ancient goddesses who spin, wind and finally cut the thread of each person's existence.' pp 12-13

There's a passage in one of my book chapters in progress where I attempt to sketch the backstory of the relationship between texts and textiles; I admire the economy and elegance of Higgins' summary here. Before the eighteenth century, when new technologies of weaving (the flying shuttle and the spinning jenny) were invented, producing and processing fibre to make textiles required immense amounts of time and effort.

'...the lives of most women, and many men, were dominated by the slow, laborious processes required to make cloth. Partly because few examples have survived from the classical world, and partly because they were long overlooked as mere 'women's work', textiles have only fairly recently taken off as the object of serious study. Now, though, they are being investigated in all of their aspects---sociological, economic, archaeological, literary, metaphorical, mathematical--and rightly seen as central to live in the ancient world.' p. 11

Greek Myths: A New Retelling by Charlotte Higgins

I'm lucky to be writing my chapters about textiles at a time when this field of research is growing in so many directions. As I was formatting the bibliography for "Has geminas artes: text and textiles in the world of Attusia Lucana Sabina," earlier this month, I was struck by the sheer range of work I was citing: archaeology, experimental archaeology, literary studies, and more! It was particularly exciting to read about scholars' and weavers' attempts to reproduce ancient textiles as a way to learn more about how the techniques and time commitment involved in making them. Such scholarship challenges old assumptions about the complexity of ancient textiles.

'Despite the fact that textiles survivals from the ancient world are so sparse, there are plenty of indications that real, non-mythical cloth could be woven with complex designs--most notably the textile annually offered in Athens to the sculpture of Athena Polias, which was said to have depicted the gods' battles with the giants...Scholars long believed this kind of complicated pattern would have been impossible to create on so simple a device as a warp-weighted loom--but it is perfectly possible.' p. 12

Greek Myths: A New Retelling uses the ancient literary device of ekphrasis--a literary description of a physical work of art--as the roving from which to spin accounts of the stories of eight women of Greek myth--Athena, Alcithoë, Philomela, Arachne, Andromeda, Helen, Circe, and Penelope. Weaving features prominently in each of their stories, and description of the textiles they are making is an ingenious framing device. Each story opens with a line drawing by Chris Ofili, which enhance the text beautifully. For a unique and lovely introduction or reintroduction to Greek myth, this is a book to seek out and enjoy.

Further Reading

The notes and bibliography provide an excellent source of further reading. I bookmarked several scholars, publications, and projects to explore more thoroughly. Some I have since encountered in my research over the past year and some I look forward to digging into in 2024 and beyond.

 

Scholars and Projects

• Professor Mary Harlow (Wikipedia) (Archaeological Textiles Review)
  
• Dr Ellen Harlizius-Klück (Academia.edu)
• The Penelope Project  at the Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science at the Deutsches Museum, Munich (Project Publications on Zenodo)

Books and Poems

• Elizabeth Ward Barber (1996), Women's Word: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Society in Early Times 
• Fiona Benson, [transformation: Callisto] (a poem about the Callisto myth, found in Benson's collection Vertigo & Ghost (2019), reviewed by Colin Burrows in the London Review of Books here)
• E. Karslus and G. Fanfani, (eds). Homo Textor: Weaving as a Technical Mode of Existence (forthcoming, Munich; publication date is given on one contributor's faculty page as 2022)
  
• Carol Helibrun (1985), What was Penelope Unweaving? in Hamlet's Mother and Other Women: Feminist Essays in Literature. There's apparently a great quote that talks about weaving and women's language and story
• Theocritus, Idyll 15, which describes a textile at the festival of Adonis, where there are 'tapestries so marvellous that the figures depicted on them seem to move' p. 286
• The Illiad and the Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson. I'm particularly interested in reading Wilson's translation of Illiad 22, which is the scene when Andromache learns the news of her husband Hector's death. As Higgins puts it: 'When she realises what has happened, she rips off her headdress and drops her shuttle: one of the great devastating moments in literature.' (p. 285) 

*These include Before We Were Trans by Kit Heyam, The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, and The Gates of Europe: A New History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, not necessarily in that order.