Leverhulme award for Hertford Historian
3 June 2015
David Hopkin, fellow and tutor in modern European history, has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Trust Fellowship. From January 2016 to April 2017 he will be researching the songs of European lacemakers. Here he explains why:
“Before the First World War hundreds of thousands of women across Europe were employed in the homemade lace industry in France, Belgium and Italy. Lace production was difficult to mechanize, but this domestic industry survived in part because it was protected by aristocrats, monarchs and the Catholic Church. Lace is the most ideological of textiles, associated with purity, femininity, domesticity and piety (hence its use at first communion and weddings). But despite being patronized by the super-rich, lacemakers themselves were usually impoverished. This combination of social problems and ‘traditional’ values brought the lacemaker to public attention in the nineteenth century: her image was celebrated in tourist posters, her equipment was collected for museums. These sources provide a rare opportunity to study women’s domestic work culture.
It is often assumed by historians that domestic women workers are subjects ‘without a voice’. They wrote no memoirs, they left no archives, no guild or union spoke for them. Some historians have argued that they had no identity as workers because they remained always under the authority of husbands and fathers. However, hundreds of lacemakers have left some testimony to their lives, in their songs. Lacemakers were amongst the most prominent informants of folksong collectors in all three countries: we have thousands of texts and hundreds of audio recordings in which lacemakers expressed their views on marriage, poverty, the Church, sexuality, exploitation and faith. You can hear this for yourself by looking up Virginie Granouillet (1878-1862), a lacemaker from the Velay region of France, on the Archives sonores de l’AMTA website.
The rhythm of song was sometimes used to regulate the pace of work, but more often songs just accompanied the work process. Lacemaking encouraged singing partly because lacemakers worked collectively (as you can see on the video ‘Les dentellières de Montusclat’ on the Institut national de l’audiovisuel so they could share repertoires. It was also a feature of their apprenticeship. Lacemakers often learnt their trade in schools run by nuns or pious laywomen, and a repertoire of religious songs and stories was part and parcel of their education.
One of the striking features of this corpus is that lacemakers’ repertoires of both religious and secular songs were very similar across different regions and different languages and dialects. This is not just true at the level of themes, such as female martyred saints and sexual murder, but specific texts and melodies reoccur across Catholic Europe. Although this can partly be explained by the role played by counter-Reformation institutions in the spread of lace skills, the messages contained in these songs was not altogether orthodox. We are dealing here with a transnational, but specifically feminine work-culture, in which issues of hunger, misery, oppression and violence compete with visionary piety. That is what this research seeks to document.”