La seta in Italia dal Medioevo al Seicento: Dal baco al drappo (review)

Cloth making was one of the most important industries of medieval and early modern Europe. It entailed complex technologies whose variations depended on the nature of the fiber—whether wool, cotton, silk, or linen. In this volume, a particular textile, silk, from one region, the Italian peninsula, becomes the unifying theme in a diverse, interdisciplinary set of studies that form an unusually coherent collection. The fabrication of silk cloth from the filaments produced by the silkworm is an ancient art that by the twelfth century had appeared in several towns of northern Italy. Silk production expanded rapidly in Lucca, Florence, Bologna, Venice, Genoa, and Milan, and developed in other locales as well. By the sixteenth century, silk was important to Italy and to the rest of Europe for economic, cultural, and social reasons. Produced within a highly developed craft tradition that also excelled in artistic design, Italian silks dominated European markets.

This volume collects nineteen papers that were first presented in a symposium of specialists in Italian silk making held in Venice in November 1997. One of its great virtues is that it represents the different kinds of expertise necessary to investigate the complex topic of medieval and early modern silk production. Sources include documents scattered in the archives of diverse cities, including tax records, commercial contracts, and treatises on silk making. Investigations of silk in major centers such as Venice are joined by studies of silk production in less well-examined locales, notably in Danilo Gasparini's analysis of seventeenth-century records for Venetian silk taxes collected from the area of Treviso, Edoardo Demo's study of silk production in Verona and Vicenza, Giuseppe Chicco's investigation of silk in the Piedmont, and Rosalba Ragosta Portioli's essay on sixteenth-century Naples, which establishes the vitality and importance of silk production in southern Italy.

Several of the essays focus on innovation. Flavio Crippa describes the development of silk spinning and throwing machines in detail. Roberto Berveglieri and Carlo Poni analyze patents and privileges given by Venice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sophie Desrosiers discusses the origin of velvet in Europe and suggests the possibility that the European technique of making velvet wool cloth was transferred to silk making.

There are extensive material remains of cloth from medieval and early modern times. Study of those remains requires an expertise quite different from that used in the archive, one that can distinguish numerous weaves, cloths from specific locales, diverse dyes, and particular brocades. In her essay on cloth remains in the churches of Venice, Doretta Davanzo Poli demonstrates that the study of actual material is an important avenue of investigation. In addition to cloth itself, archeological sources include the remains of silk making equipment as well as visual images of aspects of silk production. Alessandro Mellano and Aurelio Toselli describe in fascinating detail the remains of a still-standing silk factory established in the Piedmont region of Italy in the seventeenth century.

Some of the studies analyze broader areas. David Jacoby discusses the commerce in silk cloth between the Levant, Byzantium, and Venice in the medieval era, and Francesco Battistini analyzes Italian silk production from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Essays on labor issues include Patrizia Mainoni's study of the migration of silk workers. Coeditor Luca Molà investigates women workers in the Venetian silk industry, making the important point that women's work should be studied on its own terms and not just in comparison to men's work. Studies that treat the culture of silk include Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli's essay on medieval sumptuary laws pertaining to silk and Claudio Zanier's meticulous investigation of the folkloric tradition of the biblical Job in the guise of St. Job, protector of silk making.

This volume is noteworthy for the high quality of its individual...