On Sep 1, 2008, at 11:08 AM, Julie Tamura wrote:
Greetings
I have always heard that tatting didn't come into use before the
1700s and
so haven't been doing it for Tudor/Elizabethan. Yesterday I was
told by a
lady that needle tatting can be documented to quite early and she
said it's
mentioned several times in the Canterbury Tales. She also
mentioned that
it's related to making fishing nets.
I'm wondering if any of you knowledgeable folks out there can help
me. I'm
having a problem with her data for a couple of reasons.
1) If tatting shows up in the Canterbury Tales, I know word
meanings change
over hundreds of years. Do we know that tatting then is what we call
tatting?
2) It's quite a reach from fishing nets to the tiny rings and
picots of
tatting. I believe they're related but I don't consider net making
proof of
tatting.
Particularly given the reference to fishing nets, it sounds like this
is coming from the point of view of "any technique that bears a
tangential technical resemblance to Technique X _is_ Technique X and
therefore is support for all forms of Technique X being historically
appropriate for any time period when those other techniques can be
found." It's a fairly common line of reasoning found when the goal
is to demonstrate the great antiquity of Technique X -- either
because being older is somehow felt to make the technique "better" in
some indefinable way, or because the person doing the reasoning is
fond of doing Technique X, fond of Time Period Y, and wants to feel
good about doing Technique X in the context of Time Period Y.
If "tatting" is defined as "building a thread structure by means of
half-hitches formed around a ground thread" then that definition
includes certain types of needle lace (in addition to including
shuttle-based tatting, although it then excludes the many types of
netting that don't use half-hitches). If "tatting" is defined as
"building a thread structure by knotting a thread carried on a bobbin
around existing threads in the work" then that definition includes
most types of netting (although it then excludes needle-lace).
On the other hand, the Canterbury Tales reference may be a matter of
a too-eager reading of a more careful statement. Doing a Google
search on "Canterbury Tales" + "tatting" turns up the following quote
from Rebecca Jones' (no relation) "Tatting -- Origins and History":
"Tatting is believed to have evolved from knotting, which in various
forms is a very ancient type of decoration for clothing. The
Egyptians used knotting as decoration on ceremonial dress and a mummy
was found with a skirt overlay of knotted rings which look very much
like tatting.
The early Chinese also used knotting and couched their knotted
designs into their embroideries. These eventually found their way to
Europe and knotting was popular for the decoration of furnishings and
embroideries in Medieval times - Chaucer even mentions it in his
Canterbury Tales (1387)."
A careful reading of this statement shows that it only says that
"knotting" was mentioned in the Canterbury Tales -- not that anything
that might properly be named "tatting" was. So while Jones may well
be guilty of tossing in mention of a lot of irrelevant techniques in
an attempt to give tatting an air of great antiquity, she doesn't
appear to be guilty of making specific unsubstantiated claims about
tatting itself. (You might want to ask your correspondent if she can
give you the specific passages in Chaucer that mention tatting --
many people repeat these sorts of claims at multiple generations,
like a game of "telephone", without ever questioning the precise
nature and meaning of the original statements.)
My take on this sort of thing is that if one wants to identify the
historic context for a particular technique -- which in the case of
shuttle-based tatting is not simply a fabric built of half-hitches
using a shuttle, but the specific use of a sliding loop where the
shuttle thread is knotted around the loop then straightened to
transfer the half-hitch to the sliding loop itself -- then one needs
to find clear examples of _that_ technique, not general examples of
possibly related or possibly ancestral techniques. But then, I have
Opinions on this sort of topic.
Heather
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