The Woven Archive. Material Characterization of Textile Collections in Archives and Libraries

Textiles are present in archival and library collections in multiple and sometimes surprising forms: enclosed in letters, in fabric swatch books and as samples in dyers´ notebooks; but also, as wrappings for wax seals, in embroidered bindings or as the substrate of early photographs known as pannotypes [1]. Such textiles are a relatively unknown and understudied resource, as often they are not included in public catalogues nor digitized. Interestingly, textiles in archives and libraries are, in general, astonishingly well preserved: their vibrant colours kept away from the light and other environmental factors, which may have degraded to some extent the archaeological textile fragments and historic garments we see in museums. In addition, archival textiles are often accompanied with documentation that allows us to contextualize and accurately date them. All this makes archival and library textile collections an invaluable resource for materiality research.