History is embedded in cloth; textiles tell stories. This comprehensive study of Irish textiles found in bogs, burials, castles and elsewhere is the first of its kind since Mairead Dunleavy’s Dress in Ireland was published in 1989.
New excavations and fresh, forensic analysis of scraps of material mean, the introduction says, “that the subject never stands still”.
Elizabeth Wincott Heckett, a retired archaeologist, dedicated her professional life to the study of this subject; the book presents nearly all her writings – articles, papers and presentations – in this one volume, information that occasionally overlaps.
Divided into 32 chapters ranging from prehistoric times to early modern Ireland, among the innumerable interesting finds she examines are a leather cloak and woollen mantle wrapped around the body of a young man in Kildare – the only two pieces of clothing found in Ireland from the second to the fourth century AD.
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Though there is evidence of horsehair, deerskin and even otter skin in clothing, it was wool that was widely used in the medieval and post-medieval period in Ireland and elsewhere. Silk was the preserve of the wealthy, but the use of flax is extensively outlined. Her research into the head coverings worn by 10th-century women in Viking Dublin, a style called the Dublin Cap, gained her worldwide recognition.
The shaggy mantle, very much a part of Irish identity for many centuries, is covered in some detail, its last pictorial representation in a painting of Sir Neil O’Neill in 1680 wearing one lavishly fringed with silk.
Those responsible in the eighth century for the Book of Kells, the Tara brooch and Ardagh chalice could equally, she argues, have had the ability to create fine textiles.
The final chapter on the ornate liturgical fabrics produced for the Honan Chapel in Cork at the height of the Arts & Crafts movement by women in Cork and the Dun Emer Guild in Dublin both underlined the role of women artists and craftworkers inspired by the Celtic past at the time. It makes a fitting conclusion.
The book, rich in detail across 500 pages, is painstaking in its analysis of textile composition, has an extensive bibliography, index and many charts and illustrations (including a magnificent portrait of a bejewelled Elizabeth Fitzgerald from 1560).
It will be invaluable reading for historians, archaeologists and others interested in Irish material culture for a long time to come.
