I haven't been able to find any major difference between samite today and
samite then, beyond a different taste in the patterns. Since samite by
definition is a weave rather than a combination of weave, fiber, and weight
(unlike say, denim) it hasn't really changed much. It was _generally_ but
not exclusively made of silk... there were cheap versions with bast warps,
for example. The name itself comes from the Greek word hexamitos which
means 6 threads, and which is the basic weaving unit for samite.
In other words, that's sort of like asking if 'velvet' means the same now as
it did then. Modern velvet manufacture uses different looms and different
fibers and different cutting methods, but in the technical sense they are
both velvet.
The only change I've found happened sometime in the middle ages (I don't
have notes on the time range) and is too technical for me: they started
arranging the warp threads in pairs, with 2 main warps to each of 3 binding
warps. Before that, they arranged 3 main and 3 binding warps in 1/2 or 2/1
order. (The 1.2 weft-faced compound twills in the Crowfoot et al MOL
Textiles book pp101-104 are examples of one or the other way of doing it,
according to at least one source, but I might be missing something technical
there.) The introduction of drawlooms (which might have existed in the
12thC) increased the complexity of the patterns, but didn't change the
actual weave--it was still a samite structure.
If your friend were to give a brief description of samite, she might try
something like this: 'a weft-faced compound twill frequently made of silk,
often patterned, sometimes with gold or silver thread, and sometimes used as
a base for embroidery.' That is accurate for samite through the ages,
although it's probably a longer description than she'd want to insert in
that sentence!
Sources... I got a real samite bug a couple of years ago, and read
everything about it that I could find, so I can't point you to one specific
source. While I didn't keep a strict bibliography for those notes, here are
a few books/articles that I'm pretty sure were involved:
Geijir, Agnes, "The Textile Finds from Birka," in N.B. Harte and K.G.
Ponting, eds. Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe. London: Heinemann.
1983.
Geijer, Agnes. A History of Textile Art: A Selective Account, corrected
edition. (London: Pasold Resaerch Fund in association with Sotheby Parke
Bernet, 1982 [1979].
Muthesius, Anna. "Byzantine Influences Along the Silk Route: Central Asian
Silks Transformed." Contact, Crossover, Continuity (Textile Society of
America) (1994)
Muthesius, Anna. Byzantine Silk Weaving AD 400 to AD 1200. Vienna: Verlag
Fassbaender, 1997.
Muthesius, Anna. "From Seed to Samite: Aspects of Byzantine Silk
Production." Textile History 20:2 (1989)
Muthesius, Anna. Studies in Byzantine and Islamic Silk Weaving. London:
Pindar Press, 1995.
John Becker and Donald B. Wagner, Pattern and Loom: A Practical Study of the
Development of Weaving Techniques in China, Western Asia and Europe.
(Copenhagen: Rhodos International Publishers, 1987) 105
Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, Textile Conservation and Research: A Documentation
of the Textile Department on the Occasion of the Twentieth Anniversary of
the Abegg Foundation.( Schriften der Abegg-Stiftung, Volume VII. Bern:
Abegg-Stiftung, 1988.)
David Jenkins, ed. The Cambridge History of Western Textiles. (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
There's tons more out there, but that's a start.
-E House
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