Lesley O’Connell Edwards from Honeybourne has taken part in a project to research the knitting of liturgical gloves, finely crafted, ornately embellished and made of high-quality materials such as silk and metal thread, produced from the twelfth century to the nineteenth for prelates of the western Catholic Church.
Lesley said, “The research project combined my expertise in historic knitted artefacts with my interest in medieval church history.”
She has previously recreated children’s petticoats and mittens for The Tudor Tailor, an online resource for the social history of dress.
She continued, “The project was the first to examine these gloves systematically, including placing them in their historical and liturgical context and establishing an illustrated database of all the 96 gloves traced, which is hosted in the Knitting in early modern Europe database.
“Examining these beautiful finely crafted gloves has only increased my admiration for the skills and abilities of the unknown knitters who created these. Working on the project also led me down some fascinating byways in medieval liturgical theology.”
You can read the full research paper here —>
Right: Liturgical gloves from the treasury of the Cathedral of St Bertrand de Comminges, France (inventory number 58-P-726); image: Dr Angharad Thomas.
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