It can be tough, being a medieval quilt historian.
Consider what’s involved:
- Large quantities of books, many of them out of print, many of them insanely expensive, many of them with full-color pictures, glossy pages, and text in languages I don’t understand.
- Access to actual period examples, almost all of which are in museums and private collections, some of which are happy to let visiting scholars take a peek, others not so much.
- Travel to the said museums and private collections, and isn’t it a shame that most of the really old stuff (like, y’know, what I study) is in Europe and not conveniently on the Eastern Seaboard where I can get to it without spending thousands of dollars on plane tickets and hotel rooms?
- Wangling borrowing/access cards, appointments, and visits to archives, libraries, and other repositories for a few precious hours so I can read, study, and otherwise consult the books I can’t afford, find, or otherwise acquire for myself.
- Convincing curators that I am not a Dangerous Lunatic who will either steal, trash, or breath/spit/dribble/blow my nose on their precious artifacts (and yes, this almost happened a while back, when I came very close to sneezing on a 900 year old painting. Don’t ask).
- Large quantities of bookshelves to hold the said large quantities of books, many of them roughly the size and weight of my family’s antique German-language Bible that I could use as a weapon if I had to.
That’s not even counting the dust, the constant hand washing if one is allowed to touch anything, the expense of getting photo permissions, sometimes from foreign entities or picture archives, the occasional tiny bathroom attendant in a European castle who pops up from a corner, stretches out a clawlike hand, and demands “zwei pfennig!” in a high-pitched voice that causes bats to drop dead in mid-flight.
And then there are the people who appear at lectures and classes and are eager to share their knowledge with me, the expert they’ve come to see, and point out all the flaws and mistakes that I’ve made, like the following:
- “Are you certain that patchwork quilts only date from the 18th century? My grandmother had a scrap bag she used for quilts, you know, so surely our medieval ancestors did the same thing!” (which is great, but unless Granny was named “Isabelle de Hainault” and was born in 1352 or thereabouts, not really relevant, plus peasant wool is not good for quilts and I have the scars to prove it)
- “My local historical society has an old quilt the town clerk said belonged to his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and has some fabric from First Selectman Preserved Fish’s waistcoat from 1658!” (stitched together in a pattern that was first published by the Kansas City Star in 1929, about two hundred years after old Preserved joined his dear wife, Submit, in the local graveyard alongside their cousin Rev. Dr. Zerubbebal Nimrod Symington and his son, Tubal-Cain)
- “Why did they buy fabric only to cut it up and sew it back together again, huh? What kinda sense does that make? Huh? My wife does it and drives me nuts — “ (because European royalty wanted to show off their heraldry, you twit, which you’d know if you watched anything besides NASCAR or the “Hitler was Rescued by Ancient Aliens and whisked away to Alpha Centauri for Breeding Purposes” episode on Ancient Aliens Celebrity Chili Cook Off with Bobby Flay)
- “I saw this beautiful quilt on an episode of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman — it was clearly an old pattern, Double Wedding Ring, can you tell me the history? It’s medieval, isn’t it? What do you mean, no? It looked so old! Are you sure? ” (no, it’s from 1928, we know exactly when it was created, and yes, I’m sure, THIS IS WHY YOU ASKED ME TO COME LECTURE IN YOUR PATHETIC LITTLE CHURCH BASEMENT, YOU #!@$#@!$!@##$#@!$!@$!@# — )
Fortunately most of my audience isn’t like this, which is why I haven’t beaten any of them to death with an embroidery hoop (yet). It may happen, though, and if it does, I’m sure you’ll see it somewhere on teh Intarwebz. With my luck, even committing a major felony would be ridiculous.
For all the difficulties, challenges, and expense of studying old quilts, I love it. This should be obvious — why else would I have spent around six large ones on a couple of trips abroad to see, respectively, a pillow and a wallhanging? — but it’s true. I love quilts, all types and ages and patterns, but more than anything else I love the very earliest, rarest, least known examples of the art. I study them, I hunt down obscure references in rare books, I freak out when I see them (see: the five minutes I spent gasping and staring and all but in tears of joy when I finally got to the see the 1394 Tristan Quilt at the Victoria & Albert Museum two years ago), I do my best to interpret what I find…
It’s what I was born to do, or least that’s how it feels sometimes.
The problem is that a lot of the time I’m working without a net. I am one of about a dozen serious scholars in the world studying pre-1700 quilts, and if there are more than three or four of us who go earlier, I’ll be shocked. Whatever I do, whatever I say in a lecture or publish in an article, will end up in the scholarly literature and be consulted by fellow textile researchers for years to come.
Even if I’m wrong.
So far I haven’t made all that many egregious, or even minor, errors. It’s still a possibility, though, even though everything that gets into print is revised, reviewed, and goes through multiple drafts to prevent such an eventuality. A letter, an artifact, another scholar’s work that’s gone out of print — any of those could sink my career, or at least make every word I’ve ever written on old textiles look foolish.
I know this, and I publish anyway. A good scholar knows very well that her work is subject to question, and will almost certainly be updated or even superseded in years to come. The best I can hope is that my work will be a firm foundation for those to come, who’ll use it to do what I can’t and extend our knowledge of an old and honorable textile art beyond anything I ever dreamed of.
Tonight I bring you two examples of books that are sincere attempts at sketching out the history of old quilts. The authors did their best with the information they had, and if their errors were surprisingly durable (and influential), well, that wasn’t their fault. Without them blazing the trail, who knows if anyone would have bothered to look upon Aunt Letty’s moldering parlor throw or Great-Grandma’s worn Double Irish Chain as more than dust rags:
Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them, by Marie D. Webster — Marie Webster, born Marie Daugherty, was one of the true giants of the Arts & Crafts movement of the early 20th century. The wife of a respected banker in Wabash, Indiana, Marie had learned fine needlework as a child and was a skilled artisan by the time she took up quilting at the age of fifty. Her beloved husband, George, had been severely crippled by rheumatoid arthritis at a shockingly young age, and Marie thought quilting would be a good way to pass the time while she oversaw his care.
And so it was, at least until she saw a quilt in the traditional Rose of Sharon pattern, decided she could do a better job, and painstakingly designed, appliqued, and quilted her own version. The result was so good that Marie’s friends all encouraged her to send the quilt to the Ladies’ Home Journal, which then boasted a circulation of 1.6 million thanks to its influential editor, Edward Bok.
This Marie did. To her surprise, the magazine promptly replied with the good news that not only did they like her take on Rose of Sharon, they wanted more samples of her work, with an eye to possible publication. Not only that, they’d publish her designs in full color (!), for their subscribers to admire and emulate. And if that weren’t enough, would Mrs. Webster kindly write a few articles on quilting for LHJ’s readers, since she clearly was an expert?
This Mrs. Webster was more than happy to do. And so it was that starting in 1911, Marie Webster became America’s best-known, most respected quilter and quilt historian. She designed dozens of patterns, most of them appliques in the soft pastels and simple florals made popular by the burgeoning Arts & Crafts Movement, and her Practical Patchwork Company sold both the patterns and the kits until well into the 1940’s. Literally thousands of examples are preserved in museums and private collections, while quilt historians continue to study all the variations of what might well be the single most successful needlework company run by a single individual in the 20th century. Best of all, Marie Webster’s granddaughter compiled two books of the Practical Patchwork Company’s best patterns for the modern quilter, as well as a modern edition of Marie’s pioneering book Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them.
This book, which came out in 1915 to glowing reviews, caused a sensation. Not only was it written the most famous quilter in America, not only was it chock full of patterns, instructions, and photographs (some in full color!), it was the first known attempt anywhere to write a comprehensive history of quilting, patchwork, and applique. Marie, who’d only been quilting for six years and had both a husband to nurse and a company to run, had somehow found the time to read over two dozen books describing old quilts, quilting lore, and needlework in general to make sure that her book was as accurate as possible given the information available in the early 20th century.
Best of all? The version of quilt history she gives holds up surprisingly well. The broad outline she gives — that quilting as we know it started in the East and worked its way to the West along the trade routes, with a big boost after the Crusades — is pretty much accurate. Oh, she makes errors, but if you, my faithful readers, can find any non-fiction work from 1916 that doesn’t, I’d be shocked. She did the best she could with the sources she had, and by and large she got it right. That alone justifies her spot in the Quilter’s Hall of Fame.
The problem with Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them is that Marie Webster wasn’t a trained historian, and boy does it show. The book is engagingly written, but the early chapters skip about from New York collectors to Italian door coverings to contemporary Egyptian appliques with barely a transitional clause, let alone a paragraph. She made the then-common mistake of assuming that needlework traditions in “ancient cultures” hadn’t changed for millennia, crammed in fascinating but not relevant folklore (some gleaned from novels), and included descriptions of whole non-related fields like early dyeing, candlewick coverlets, and so on. She also relies on early sources that were not precisely accurate; opus consutum is a term that was sometimes used to refer to early applique, but because the Countess of Wilton said it also could mean patchwork, well, so does Marie.
And of course she claims that thrifty colonial housewives invented modern American patchwork by saving and using their calico scraps, even though most of them never saw a piece of printed calico in their lives). This particular myth is nearly as persistent, and annoying, as the idea that there was an Underground Railroad Quilt Code used by escaping slaves (spoiler: there is no, repeat, no evidence for this prior to a very bad book from 1999).
Worst of all is the placement of the illustrations. Marie had no problem with inserting a photograph of a quilt she’d designed to emphasize a point on early quilting or coverlets (see: the very modern “Bed Time Quilt” in the chapter on medieval quilting), or having a fine Star of the East in the section discussing the 16th century Hardwick Hall embroideries. It’s bewildering even if you don’t know anything about quilts, and verges on maddening if you do.
For all this, Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them is still one of the most important, influential needlework books ever written. Quilts and their makers were now worthy of serious study, with a history and lore of their own, and that attitude alone was enough to inspire generations of later writers, researchers, and quilters. Marie Webster may not have gotten everything right, but she was right enough that every single quilt historian alive, including me, owes her an incalculable debt.
Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them, by Ruth Finley —Ruth Finley, daughter of the grandly named Dr. Leonidas Ebright (later surgeon general of the great state of Ohio), was a generation younger than Marie Webster, and it shows in both her life and her work.
Marie Webster was raised to be the wife of a successful man, only becoming a writer and businesswoman in her own right after her husband was too ill to work. Ruth Ebright, an avowed feminist from a politically connected family who briefly attended Oberlin College, had a successful career as a investigative reporter, newspaper editor, and novelist before marrying fellow reporter Emmet Finley in her mid-20’s. Marie spent almost her entire life in the Midwest, only moving East as an elderly widow. Ruth and her husband made tracks for New York in 1920, just in time for glories of the Jazz Age. Marie Webster had learned to use a needle as a child and only turned to quilt making and designing in middle age. Ruth Finley didn’t actual make any quilts and only designed one, but she’d been an avid antiques collector from an early age and began buying old quilts directly from the women who made them on the long motor trips she made around the time of the Great War.
Most important of all, Marie Webster was relying partly on earlier writings and partly on the quilt lore that she picked up from friends and customers when she wrote Quilts: Their Story and How to Make Them. Ruth Finley supplemented the above by what we’d now call fieldwork and oral history, interviewing the rural quilters she encountered on her travels and meticulously documenting each of her purchases’ maker, pattern name, and age (if known). This meant that her writing has a refreshingly modern focus on the quiltmakers and their need to express themselves through their art, not just the quilts themselves, that Marie Webster’s often lacks.
This is particularly true of Old Patchwork Quilts and the Women Who Made Them. Marie Webster listed hundreds of old patterns, but Ruth Finley did her best to tell their stories, as well as the stories of the women who’d made them. Ruth labored for fifteen full years on Old Patchwork Quilts before it was finally published in 1929, meaning that she began her work a year or so before the publication of Marie Webster’s magnum opus. Unlike Marie, though, Ruth’s interviews with individual quilters gave her insights into the cultural and social context of quilters’ lives and American society as a whole, and if that meant she repeated the folklore that had arisen around quilts as historical fact, she’s not the first quilt historian to do so and she almost certainly won’t be the last.
This was particularly true of the dates on many of the patterns. America was in the middle of the Colonial Revival when she did the bulk of her writing, with Henry Ford, Electra Havemeyer Webb, and Henry and Helen Flynt founding historic villages, colonial-costumes pageants cropping up throughout the Original Thirteen Colonies, and reproduction colonial furniture, spinning wheels, and textiles appearing in numerous middle and upper class homes. It’s no surprise that Ruth believed many of the simpler patterns she wrote about had originated in the 18th century, even though the great flowering of patchwork patterns took place after the American Civil War. Nor is it all that much of a surprise that she wasn’t fully aware of all the modern but old looking patterns being published in the Kansas City Star and other newspapers. She was looking for answers in the past, not the present, and like so many researchers with a good idea, she found what she was looking for.
Old Patchwork Quilts was, if anything, more of a sensation than Marie Webster’s pioneering text. The Depression was in full swing, and Ruth’s stories of quilt patterns from an equally fraught time in American history appealed to needleworkers and art historians alike. She only designed one pattern, the Roosevelt Rose, in honor of the President who guided us out of the Depression, but her book never entirely went out of print, and not long ago the modern quilt historian Barbara Brackman edited and wrote the introduction to a new edition. Somewhat florid language aside, its stories of individual women and their needlework could have been written just as easily during 1970’s women’s art movement, when literally hundreds of neglected female artists and artisans were finally given their due.
It’s also safe to say that without Marie Webster and Ruth Finley, there might not have been a quilt revival in the 1970’s, when the Bicentennial brought yet another Colonial Revival sweeping across the American landscape. Jinny Beyer, Jean Ray Laury, Beth Gutcheon, and countless others turned to Marie and Ruth’s books for inspiration and information.
That includes the women who joined Sally Garouette in 1980 to found the American Quilt Study Group. This organization, which aims “to preserve the story of quiltmaking - past, present, and future,” is one of the leading textile study groups in the world, with members doing fine work on individual patterns, techniques, and traditions.
That includes non-American quilts, too. The AQSG has published work on quilting in the South Seas, in indigenous American populations, and in medieval Europe. Some members’ work focuses on correcting the errors and myths that crept into Marie and Ruth’s books, but there isn’t a quilt historian alive who doesn’t owe these two women an enormous debt.
That includes me. I’ve been a member of the AQSG for nearly twenty years, and one of my first public workshops on medieval quilting took place at the AQSG Seminar in Lowell, Massachusetts, about a dozen years ago. I may publish primarily through Robin Netherton’s DISTAFF group, but I will never give up my membership in the AQSG, or cease to regard the women in it as friends and colleagues.
And though Marie Webster’s photographs are a mess, and Ruth Finley misdated many of her patterns, tonight I salute them and their work. Without them, I wouldn’t have even thought about researching old quilts, let alone traveled abroad to see old examples. Their work laid the groundwork for mine, and for that alone I will be forever grateful.
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Have you ever made a quilt? Heard of Marie Webster or Ruth Finley? Thought Marie Webster was related to Marie Callendar? Assumed that quilting is entirely American? Owned a genuine Colonial Revival 1920’s butter churn or spinning wheel you thought was older? It’s a humid, sticky night here at the Last Homely Shack, so pour yourself a cold one and share….
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