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Distaffs And Spindles: Sexual Misbehavior In Sebald Beham’S Spinning Bee, Alison Stewart

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Faculty Publications and Creative Activity

Sebald Beham from Nuremberg designed his Spinning Bee woodcut around 1524 (Figure 1) as a medium-sized work of approximately 1 ft by 1.5 ft, printed on two sheets of paper glued side by side. A large number of individuals are included and most are women, significantly so because spinning bees served as meeting places for rural girls and women where they would spin and amuse themselves during the fall and winter evenings. Beham’s print is the first surviving example of a spinning bee in visual art and one of the first substantive examples of the theme in any form. The …