Abstract
ABSTRACT Building upon numerous recent studies of medieval religious women’s textile production, this essay explores sewing practices among religious men. From Late Antiquity through the Central Middle Ages, monastic regulators, hagiographers, and homilists promoted stitching as a fitting activity for religious men and women alike, but ascribed different meanings to this work depending on the gender of practitioners. For religious men, sewing was a demonstration of humility, poverty, and simplicity which signalled their rejection of a lay masculinity that coded stitchery as feminine. More broadly, sewing-related metaphors, exempla and miracles evoked a monastic world in which the spiritual and domestic intermingled, so that needles and thread could be understood as both practical tools and symbols of virtue.
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