Italian Literature Commons^™

Women's Work With Wool In Fairy Tales: From Baroque Text To Textile Craft, Sophia Frye

Scripps Senior Theses

Fiber art has a complex, long-standing history; the relationship between the craft and the craftsman is intimate and goes beyond the commodification of the product. Business records from Florentine guilds give insight into the wool industry, but are unable to capture the social history of wool crafts in Renaissance-Baroque era Italy. In response, this project turns to Italian Baroque fairy tales: Giambattista Basile’s The Pentamerone (1634-36) and Giovanni Francesco Straparola’s Le Piacevoli Notti (1555). These fairy tales depict scenes of women engaging in fiber crafts, which reveal the poverty of the women textile laborers, the women’s relationship to textile work, …