Producing Women: Textile Manufacture and Economic Power on Late Medieval and Early Modern Stages

Abstract

This essay demonstrates that late medieval and early modern theatrical representations of spinsters and seamstresses connect their labor to a virtuous exercise of authority because this work was vital to the commercial success of the cloth and clothing trades. This continuity in the portrayal of female cloth-workers queries the notion of a sharp divide between late medieval and early modern literary periods. The Digby manuscript’s Candlemas Day and the Killing of the Innocents play (ca. 1512), in particular, discloses a dramatic template when depicting spinsters that Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611) appropriates and revises when representing a seamstress. Contextualizing dramatic images of women’s work in the textile trade with visual illustrations of workingwomen, this essay also shows that the theater sometimes contests the contemporary critique of women’s participation in economic activity by representing their labor as worthy.