'A Cunning Skill Did Lurk': Susanna Perwich and the Mysteries of a Seventeenth-Century Needlework Cabinet. (3rd July 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Rosner, Isabella
• Is Part Of: Textile history. Volume 49:Number 2(2018)
• Page Start: 140
• Page End: 163
• Publication Date: 2018-07-03
• Subjects: Textile fabrics -- History -- Periodicals; Textile industry -- History -- Periodicals; Clothing and dress -- History -- Periodicals; 746.09005
• DOI: 10.1080/00404969.2018.1509436
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0040-4969

Abstract

Abstract : A seventeenth-century embroidered cabinet belonging to the Los Angeles Museum of Art includes a rare detail — a coat of arms. This essay explores the likelihood that the maker of this cabinet, as established by its coat of arms, was a member of the Perwich family, who ran a girls' school in Civil War-era London, and the possibility that the cabinet was made by Susanna Perwich, a musical prodigy and subject of a 1661 biography published shortly after her untimely death. This essay discusses connections between Perwich's life and the cabinet's needleworked illustrations, revealing that the cabinet illustrates the Book of Ruth. Cabinets and caskets with their many compartments can be seen as metaphors for the compartmentalisation of the lives of late seventeenth-century Englishwomen who were excluded from many male-dominated physical and intellectual spaces in the aftermath of the English Civil War but who, nonetheless, created and meaningfully embellished personal objects in their own spaces.