Introduction

The contadina, or countrywoman, became a distinctive and easily recognisable sartorial type in Italian visual culture during the second half of the sixteenth century. She can be spotted in the pages of costume books, friendship albums and images of tradespeople, often carrying baskets laden with her wares (Figure 9.1). In paintings of rural scenes, she helps with the harvest and tends to farm animals, clad in improbably white linens. The contadina is frequently shown as a young woman and the clothing she wears reflects her contribution to spheres of production and consumption. However, like many female subjects, her visibility is matched by her elusiveness in the archives, and very few household inventories from the period are available to relay a sense of the clothing owned or worn by these women.

This chapter analyses prevailing visual stereotypes against the backdrop of contemporary attitudes towards contadine as street-sellers, consumers of fashion and objects of desire. To move beyond the limitations of sources recorded by elite groups and outsiders, as part of our research we made a conjectural reconstruction of an apron, an accessory often associated with rural women, combining evidence from visual representations, archival descriptions and surviving objects. The decision processes involved in this experimental approach, discussed in the second section of the chapter, helped to shift our focus from the reception of the contadina’s image and moral assessments of her appearance to think more actively about how these women acquired, wore and valued their clothing.

Figure 9.1 Giuseppe Maria Mitelli, Ortolana, etching, from Di Bologna l’arti per via d’Annibale Carracci (Rome: Jacomo Rossi, 1660). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Defining rural women

The term contadina referred to women of varying degrees of wealth and status who lived and worked in villages and the countryside. Its broad nature is reflected in John Florio’s Italian–English dictionary of 1611, which translates contadina simply as ‘a Country lasse or wench’, while offering a more derogatory view of the contadino: ‘a country man, a swaine, a hinde, a clowne, a peasant’.¹ Given that a recent estimate suggests that 40 per cent of the Italian population lived in poverty, the majority of countrymen and countrywomen (contadini) would have been ‘ordinary people’ who, according to Joanne Ferraro, ‘owned only a few garments in their entire lives, most of which were produced at home’.² Interestingly, an extensive analysis of the rural poor in seventeenth-century West Sussex has shown that, despite possessing very few garments, they still sometimes distinguished themselves from others using relatively cheap goods, such as coloured ribbons and stockings.³

While we can assume most women living in the Italian countryside wore very rudimentary dress, there is similar evidence that some owned items that were not purely functional. Paolo Malanima’s analysis of archival evidence for the rural population of Tuscany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has revealed that, although many individuals went without basic items like shoes, more decorative goods – such as aprons with embroidery or trimming – are occasionally listed in household records.⁴ In these cases, it is possible that, as with the artisan groups studied by Sandra Cavallo, clothing formed the most ‘valuable component’ of their assets.⁵ In 1546, Florentine sumptuary laws incorporated a separate category for the clothing of contadine, demonstrating that they were considered collectively as a group whose dress required regulation.⁶ The subsequent laws issued by Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1562 noted that they applied to female members of families who were leaseholders as well as those who owned their own plots of land.⁷

Engagement with fashion

The 1562 Florentine laws banned contadine from wearing dresses made of silk or wool, dyed red with grana or crimson, but they were permitted hair nets and coifs of silk, silk ribbons and a necklace of ‘silver buttons’ worth up to 12 lire. They were entitled to narrow velvet belts with silver studs and buckles and silver-gilt aglets, two silver-gilt rings, decorated with ‘crystal glass stones’ or similar, and paternoster beads worth up to half a scudo. They could decorate the bodices and sleeves of their dresses with satin, damask or sarcenet, and wear a hat made of sarcenet or straw worth up to 1 scudo.⁸ The types of clothes and accessories described here imply that some women living in the countryside and villages outside Florence incorporated fashionable elements into their dress, developing strategies to achieve this despite limited financial means.

In some respects, these were well-established patterns. Bolognese sumptuary laws in 1453, for example, divided citizens into six categories, the last comprising those who lived in the countryside and carried out ‘rustic work’.⁹ These women were banned from wearing dresses and ornaments in silk and cloth dyed with grana and crimson, but they were permitted silver buttons and ornaments weighing up to 8 oz, and embroideries or fringes valued at most 3 lire per dress.¹⁰ Again, this suggests that rural families invested money in silver jewellery and decorative elements of clothing (compare Chapters 4 and 5 above). However, the sixteenth-century Florentine laws testify to new, fashionable trends that were prevalent further up the social scale, such as the growing diffusion of silk, in this instance restricted to sleeves, and smaller items such as ribbons and hair accessories, as well as materials that resembled more expensive ones, for example silver-gilt and glass stones. These types of ornament are very similar to the ones emphasised in Cesare Vecellio’s costume book De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo, first printed in 1590, such as silk ribbons, coral necklaces or little silver beads sewn on to clothing or worn as jewellery.

Given that most countrywomen owned very few, plain garments, how can we explain this growing preoccupation with their appearance? Even in Italy, with its numerous urban centres, most of the population lived in rural areas, making contadine an important component of the overall demographic.¹¹ Catherine Kovesi has noted a general move to include middling and lower social groups in fifteenth century sumptuary laws across different parts of Italy. Piedmont, Ferrara and Faenza, for example, passed legislation with separate provisions for contadini.¹² During the sixteenth century, different components of fashionable dress, including cheaper varieties of silk, mixed textiles and the types of ornamentation described above, became accessible to a wider social range, fuelling anxieties about the erosion of sartorial distinctions. Two other factors increased the significance of the dress of rural women. First, they made valuable contributions to their household and local economies, work that sometimes gave them greater mobility and visibility. Second, the focus on their virtue or marriageability suggests that the figure of the contadina gradually took her place alongside other female exemplars, usually of higher social status, prominent in early modern Italian culture.

Working women

Traces of female labour are invariably bound up in representations of the bodies and clothing of contadine: skirts and aprons are shown tied up to allow ease of movement and to protect fabrics from dirt, clogs are worn over decorative shoes, and hats shield faces from the sun. Women pictured working in fields and kitchens, as opposed to being ‘on display’ as street-sellers, tend to be shown in simpler, plain outfits, with dark-coloured aprons made of more durable-looking fabrics. Typically, the older the woman depicted, the more utilitarian her dress. The food-seller from the Marca Trevigiana in the Veneto region is the only example of an older contadina in Vecellio.¹³ Although she does wear fashionable accessories, with a belt of red or crimson silk and a bodice decorated with ‘little silver-gilt studs’ and tied with silk laces, the text underlines the functional nature of her dress over its desirability. We learn that she goes to Venice for the Saturday market, and that she takes off her big, wide-brimmed hat and carries it in her hand when she arrives in the city. She hitches up her skirts because she comes from the country, where it is very muddy, and wears thick leather ankle boots, also to protect against mud and water. The female vegetable-seller in Arti di Bologna (1646), a collection of engravings based on drawings by Annibale Carracci, is of an indeterminate age and similarly diverges from the idealised youthful femininity of many representations of contadine. Her clothing is plain, apart from her fringed shawl, and her silhouette is bulky and swaddled, typically a visual emblem of the poor.

Two elderly women appear in one of the very few portraits of rural women from this period, dating from 1634 by the Medici court artist Justus Suttermans. The genesis of the painting is explained in a letter from Cardinal Giovan Carlo de’ Medici to his younger brother Mattias, describing an evening spent at the Medici villa at Pratolino watching Suttermans make ‘portraits of those countrywomen, which he did exquisitely’.¹⁴ Although the women’s clothing appears irreproachable, being modest, clean and orderly and, so we are led to believe, the outfits they were wearing that day, Sutterman’s final composition exemplifies the taste for humorous treatments of everyday people. Pietro, the African servant on the right, is shown making a sexual gesture with his hand resting on the central woman’s shoulders, and further amusement is probably derived from the contrast between the eggs in her basket and her advanced years. Both women are mentioned in the Medici’s accounts. Domenica delle Cascine, for example, was paid not only for her ducks and chickens but also for ‘playing the fool’ for the Medici.¹⁵ As discussed below, this was not the only way that contadine provided entertainment for the family.

Vecellio’s description of a female fruit- and vegetable-grower from Chioggia begins with praise for the people living in the villages or borghi around the town and their skills in cultivating produce, which they sell in ‘great quantities’ across Venice, Chioggia and other small neighbouring islands.¹⁶ Many Italians, particularly those in more densely populated urban spaces such as Venice, depended on the successful harvests of contadini to feed their own families. It was therefore crucial that the goods and the sellers themselves were reliable and trustworthy. Concerns about the malpractices of merchants and pedlars of different social degrees were common. In La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, first printed in 1585, Tommaso Garzoni criticised merchants who purveyed ‘counterfeit goods, with corrupt and contaminated merchandise that causes famine in the cities and countryside’.¹⁷ Unsurprisingly, these negative attitudes also extended to female vendors, who were sometimes characterised as cunning or dishonest. The text accompanying Giuseppe Maria Mitelli’s etching of a vegetable-seller highlights this, asserting that she uses her seductive powers to sell her salads at higher prices (Figure 9.1).

Despite these suspicions, women continued to operate in the marketplace.¹⁸ Female vendors are prominent in costume books, although they tend to be a minority in panoramic street scenes and are absent from Ambrogio Brambilla’s 1582 etching of 189 street-sellers in Rome. For male artisans and merchants, clothing could play a role in attracting customers. It seems probable that the fine pinking on Giovanni Battista Moroni’s tailor’s doublet and his paned and lined trunk hose advertised his professional abilities.¹⁹ Similarly, Sicillo Araldo’s treatise on colours in heraldry and clothing suggests that merchants wore black to symbolise their loyalty and steadfastness.²⁰ Reading the appearance of countrywomen in this light, it is notable that they are often portrayed as clean, orderly, decorative, effectively as appealing as their merchandise. The emphasis on their white linen undergarments and accessories would also be seen as a sign of their hygiene and morality. As Araldo explained, ‘a woman’s shirt should be very white and fine, as it reflects her honesty, which should be pure and unblemished by vice’.²¹ These depictions are a far cry from the more shambolic, ragged figures sometimes shown in scenes from urban life, for example by Jacques Callot. While the fortune-tellers swathed in indefinable rags in paintings by the Caravaggisti often use their clothing to conceal stolen goods, the neat silhouette of the contadina dispels these anxieties.

The contadina’s laden baskets provide evidence of her family’s industry. Her clothing can also be seen to represent the fruits of her labour. Many rural women contributed to Florentine wool production, as highlighted in correspondence from Vincenzo Pitti, the overseer of the city’s wool guild, to Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici in 1604. Keen to emphasise how many families relied on this work, Pitti stated that in addition to those living within the city walls there were ‘female wool spinners who live on the outskirts of the city, [and] female warpers and winders, whose number is difficult to calculate as they are spread out in different places’. Nevertheless, he estimated they comprised around five hundred women.²² Countrywomen were also involved in different linen-manufacturing processes, the fabric normally used to make the shawls, scarves, coifs, shirts and aprons they are often shown wearing. Flax was grown on tenant farms and smallholdings across various regions of Italy, for the needs of individual households and to sell on. Harvesting the stems, then drying, retting, breaking, scutching and combing them to prepare the long fibres were protracted, labour-intensive activities, even before the linen thread could be spun using a spindle and distaff.

Countrywomen were frequently depicted spinning thread, sometimes in tandem with other tasks such as tending animals. A woman from the island of Ischia in Vecellio’s compendium is shown with a distaff tucked into her apron. The accompanying description explains that no silk or wool is woven in the area, so the women spend their time in spinning and in cultivating the land.²³ Ann Rosalind Jones argues that Vecellio associates this particular activity with poverty and marginalisation: in this case, for example, it is a necessity as the more skilled work of weaving is not established on the island.²⁴ Although spinning was certainly one of the key stages of textile production assigned to rural women, it was not the only one. Fifteenth-century records of linen exporters based in Cortona and the surrounding area include women who also perhaps contributed to the manufacturing processes.²⁵

Pleasure and virtue

The contadina is usually shown as an attractive, decoratively clad woman of marriageable age, a phase in women’s lives when their behaviour was particularly scrutinised. Diane Owen Hughes has demonstrated that sumptuary legislation in some Italian cities was especially stringent towards women in the periods just before and just after they wed.²⁶ Vecellio’s commentary often seeks to underline the modesty and virtue of countrywomen. The fruitseller from Chioggia arranges her hair in ‘modest styles’, while the contadine from the Veneto region who wear their best clothes to celebrate Ascension Day ‘dress very neatly and look very lovely’ (Figure 9.2).²⁷ These descriptions appear to follow the same precepts of harmony and order recommended for the clothing of women of higher ranks.²⁸ It certainly contrasts with narratives of slovenliness linked with the undeserving lower ranks, which became more prominent from the fifteenth century onwards.²⁹

Figure 9.2 Cesare Vecellio, Contadine di terre conconvicine a Venetia, woodcut from Cesare Vecellio De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice: Giovanni Bernardo Sessa, 1598). Wellcome Collection, London.

Vecellio points out the ‘beautiful needlework’ on the apron of the contadina from Tuscany (Figure 9.3), a detail that would have commended her to his readers, given that embroidery was an important female domestic skill. In contrast with this, Federico Luigini observed in his Il libro della bella donna (1554) that, while noblewomen’s embroidery brought them honour and reflected their gentility, ‘poor women’ only made practical things.³⁰ However, even basic sewing abilities would have been an essential part of household management. Embroidered or not, the apron per se was able to project female accomplishments and duties. In an account relating to a wealthier, Venetian family, we can see the same kind of simple clothing associated with countrywomen being held up as an ideal, in contrast to more luxurious, immoral fashions. In 1605, the wool merchant Vincenzo Zuccato defended himself against charges that he had contravened sumptuary laws by holding a lavish celebration for the birth of a child. He denied this, arguing that his mother and aunt ‘went around the house that day in their usual widows’ weeds of twilled wool, and wearing their white aprons, as they usually do all year round to carry out their household chores’.³¹

Figure 9.3 Cesare Vecellio, Citelle contadine di Toscana, woodcut from Cesare Vecellio De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice: Giovanni Bernardo Sessa, 1598). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Beyond the personal benefits linked with owning clean, serviceable or even decorative dress, we can also trace its contribution to the public good. Just as travellers often commented on the appearances of the fashionable female elites alongside other local attractions, rural women could be a source of pride as a collective group.³² This is especially apparent in descriptions of festive occasions. We learn from Vecellio that women from the region around Belluno often went dancing with the men they were courting, a pastime that usually ceased once they were married.³³ Additionally, the contadine from the Veneto who wore a distinctive apron, or traversa, ‘take good care of themselves all the time so as to be considered beautiful at dances, which they enjoy very much, and to entertain the owners of the land on which they work so that these men will be generous to them’ (Figure 9.2).³⁴

The spectacle of the contadina was a source of entertainment for onlookers all the way up the social scale. In May 1618, the Medici family and ‘all the Florentine nobility’ spent successive Sundays at the Medici villas at Petraia and Castello, where they were amused by dances by ‘beautiful contadine’.³⁵ The grand duke’s secretary, Curzio Picchena, recorded his enjoyment with a courtly flourish: ‘the countrywomen triumph and I pay humble reverence to them’.³⁶ A similar event is the subject of Guido Reni’s Country Dance (1601–2), where women of different social standing all wear aprons (Figure 9.4). Like the dances themselves, the clothing of contadine could reflect regional traditions, upholding the ideal that one of the key functions of dress was to mark out social and geographical identities. Different styles of aprons act as regional signifiers in costume books, as well as household and trousseau inventories. For example, early seventeenth-century archival sources from Lecce, Brindisi, Taranto and the surrounding area show that women of modest social standing wore quite distinctive aprons, in bright colours such as green and yellow and decorated with netting and cords, called vantesini, vantili and senali in local dialect.³⁷

Inevitably, female visibility sometimes brought with it dishonour. In 1581, a story reached the Medici of a monstrous birth in the Lombard countryside: ‘On the night of the Feast of Saint Sebastian … a mile outside Melegnano, a married contadina of some beauty gave birth to a monster, looking like a pig from its head to its waist and the rest of it a human creature, however it only eats minestrone as no one was prepared to breastfeed it.’³⁸ In this story, which taps into wider narratives of trust and deceit in relation to female beauty, the purity associated with young contadine in some sources, and reinforced by their clothing, is replaced with a sense of repulsion. It is noticeable that in Florentine sumptuary legislation, the category for contadine was immediately followed by prostitutes (meretrici). The equations between contadine and meretrici as objects of desire can be traced in costume books, where rural women’s bodies appear on a par with their other wares for sale and are developed further in visual tropes such as the young female egg-seller.³⁹ Although the apron could signal prized feminine virtues, it was also an accessory linked with sex workers. Vecellio’s image of a ‘public prostitute’ shows her in a full-length linen apron so transparent it reveals the silhouette of her legs underneath.⁴⁰ When Pasquetta, a Venetian sex worker, was prosecuted in 1639 for contravening sumptuary legislation, her infringements included the use of black lace on not only her silk skirt, sleeves and veil but her silk apron, too.⁴¹ The shifting use and meanings of the apron highlight the difficulty in differentiating between the clothing of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, a source of concern at all social levels.

Figure 9.4 Guido Reni, Country Dance, 1601–2. Galleria Borghese, Rome.

The apron: touch and experience

Depictions of contadine conformed to a set of social conventions: they shed light on public conceptions of the appearances of rural women but tell us little about the experiences of the women themselves. To gain more understanding of their roles as consumers and producers, we chose to make an item of clothing that was essential, everyday wear for most contadine. We took into account the fact that most aprons surviving from the period belonged to elite consumers and considered this material evidence in conjunction with visual and written sources relating to women further down the social scale. Increasingly, scholars have shown how reconstruction as a methodology can lead to a better understanding of the material qualities of early modern garments and the skills involved in making them, as well as challenging the biases inherent in top-down historical sources.⁴² Furthermore, achieving a degree of what Beverly Gordon has termed ‘textile literacy’, even by making a simple accessory like an apron, can help to extract forms of tacit knowledge that are rarely accessible through archival records.⁴³

Images of rural women tend to show two main types of aprons: the traversa, which encircled the whole waist (Figure 9.2), and the grembiule, which covered just the front of the skirt (Figure 9.3). Both usually ended just short of the skirt hem. Some are plain, while others have embroidery, fringing and other decorative elements.⁴⁴ Several early modern aprons survive in museum collections, usually highly decorated with embroidery or needle lace; they nevertheless offer insights into a range of materials and construction techniques. All the early modern Italian aprons identified in museum collections are grembiuli, made of a rectangular piece of cloth gathered on to a tape tied around the waist. Several examples use multiple panels of linen to increase the width substantially, creating a fuller apron with denser gathers.

Most of the aprons held in museum collections are made of very finely woven white linen. Images of aprons also favour linen, ranging from the fine and drapey to stiff and bulky, depending not only on the quality and weave of the fabric but also presumably on laundering and starching processes and the softening that comes with wear. In contrast, inventories of the possessions of Florentine artisans and other professional groups give a much better sense of the variety and ubiquity of aprons. Here the apron’s function is also sometimes described, for example for wearing outdoors or ‘for making bread’; the materials used include silks such as taffeta, through to wool, cotton and leather; and the range of colours is considerable.⁴⁵ Some of these coloured aprons can be spotted in genre scenes depicting kitchens or food preparation.⁴⁶ While darker colours seem more practical for working environments as they more easily conceal stains and marks, as stated previously the clean white apron had additional meaning as an indicator of status and female virtue.⁴⁷ Some surviving aprons are decorated with vertical bands of cutwork or embroidery, suggesting they were not for practical use.⁴⁸ In contrast, visual sources often show the upper half of the apron left plain, making it possible to hitch them up or wipe hands on them without spoiling any embellishments.

We chose to make a simple grembiule from a rectangle of linen (Figure 9.5). Early-seventeenth century aprons in museum collections show there was a great variety in terms of dimensions. While the average length appears to have been 80–90 cm, overall they range from 66 to 110 centimetres long.⁴⁹ The dimensions used for the reconstruction were cross-referenced with the proportions seen on the apron worn by Vecellio’s Tuscan contadina (Fig. 9.3).⁵⁰ The top width of the apron was gathered down to 20.3 cm at the waist, a similar measurement to that of a late sixteenth-century English apron in the Victoria and Albert Museum and comparable to Vecellio’s depictions.⁵¹ As modern linen widths tend to be wider than sixteenth-century ones, every side of the apron had to be cut out. Early modern aprons probably used the full selvedge width, which provided the dual benefits of conserving the fabric for possible future reuse and potentially reducing the hemming required as two edges were already finished.⁵² Linen undergarments from the period reflect the variety of fabric widths current at the time, ranging from around 63 to 104 cm.⁵³

On the basis of these measurements and our findings, a simple apron would require between one and one and a half braccia of linen. Most linens cost between 1 and 3 lire per braccio, although prices varied significantly according to quality. In the account books of wealthy Florentine families in the late sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries, prices range from 15 soldi per braccio for the coarsest linen, such as canovaccio, through to 6 lire per braccio for the most expensive imported fine linens.⁵⁴ The 1556 dowry of Claudia Mediogori, a relatively well-to-do woman from Ferrara, gives a sense of the value of finished aprons, the main distinguishing factor being the textile used.⁵⁵ Aprons were the second most common item in her trousseau, which was valued at 334 lire 2 soldi: three were made of ‘good cloth’ and worth a total of 3 lire 6 soldi; two were blue and valued together at 2 lire; eight were made of a linen or hemp fabric called boracina and together worth over 3 lire; and two were simply described as ‘used’ and worth 1 lira and 10 soldi.

In total, the apron took three and a half hours to make, including cutting out the fabric, hemming the edges and sewing on the tape tie.⁵⁶ An apron cut selvedge to selvedge with no hemming down the outer edge would take half as long, making this a significant time-saving method of construction. Not only was the apron relatively quick to sew, the reconstruction confirmed that it was not a resource-heavy process. Although it was carefully measured before cutting to ensure it followed the chosen dimensions, it felt far more instinctive to use the body to ‘measure’ proportions, rather than rulers and standard units. Cutting a selvedge-to-selvedge pattern piece required only the length and the width of the gathered top to be determined, which was easily done by holding the fabric up to the body. The reliance on spatial awareness and a sense of proportion is reminiscent of Claudia Kidwell’s findings for eighteenth-century American garment-makers, who used notched lengths of tape rather than measurements in units and ‘learned to think in spatial distances’ as part of their ‘individualized intuitive art’.⁵⁷

Figure 9.5 Recreation of an Italian gathered linen apron or grembiule by Jordan Mitchell-King.

As noted above, some images of rural women depict aprons that are highly decorated with substantial areas of embroidery and needle lace (see Experiment in focus IX).To explore the skill and labour involved in this work, we sewed sample embroideries in counted thread cross stitch, often seen on linen underwear and accessories from this period. Although large numbers of printed pattern books survive from the sixteenth century, little is known about how designs circulated further down the social scale.⁵⁸ Motifs might have been copied from other garments or possibly shared through samplers. One of the simplest motifs from Matteo Pagano’s pattern book Trionfo di Virtu. Libro Novo (Venice, 1563) took around thirty minutes to complete (Figure 9.6). Although greater speed would come with practice, embroidering a handful of these motifs would have been more time-consuming than making the apron itself.

Figure 9.6 Red silk embroidery on linen of a motif taken from Matteo Pagano, Trionfo di Virtu. Libro Novo (Venice, 1563).

Adding embroidery to an apron might require additional tools, resources and skills. An embroidery frame made the grid of the warp and weft threads clearer, as well as stabilising the fabric; while this could be hand-held, it was easiest to use placed on a trestle, as can be seen in some contemporary depictions of needleworkers.⁵⁹ Furthermore, the embroidery thread itself needs delicate handling: the silk filament used in the samples caught easily on rough skin and needed just the right amount of tension to stay smooth. The needle, thimble and silk thread had to be held with much more conscious care and a lighter touch than the linen thread of the apron. Although the counted thread technique is a simple method, it requires total concentration and good light. Fluency and spatial awareness develop during stitching, as the pattern builds up it creates points of reference, which makes counting the threads easier. Seeing the grid of warp and weft also becomes easier in the act of stitching itself, speaking to Gordon’s notion of the ‘hand of the maker’, which works in conjunction with the eyes and begins to intuit the rhythm of the movement and the feel of the materials, reducing the mental strain of such fine needlework.⁶⁰

The contrast between sewing the apron and embroidering it was striking. It is easy to imagine the former being made in the home: although a flat workspace is helpful, given that linen can be creased into folds and holds its shape well there is little need for pins or an iron, and all the work can be done over the lap. The embroidery, on the other hand, could call for more light, precision, concentration, equipment, time and space, making it far less compatible with the working lives of rural women. Surviving aprons hold a clue to the dichotomy between the different types of needlework, as the decorative sections on some examples are in fact separate panels stitched to the main fabric.⁶¹ It is possible that many rural women who made their own basic aprons embellished them with bands stitched by more accomplished female relatives or purchased these from pedlars or local fairs. This offers an insight into how the production of a single accessory could combine different social and economic networks, benefiting from the skills of domestic and professional makers.

Easier and cheaper to make than a shirt, an apron was a functional item that also enabled less well-off women to participate in the fashion for linen accessories. Most aprons would have been made of local linens or linen mixes and occasionally decorated with rudimentary forms of embroidery. The desirability of these accessories is confirmed by their presence in even the very modest wardrobes detailed in the few rural household inventories and dowry records available for this period. These cursory descriptions, together with the findings from the experimental reconstruction process, suggest that visual sources, particularly costume books, reflect the experiences of a small minority of country dwellers. Vecellio’s image of a Tuscan contadina, for example, dressed in a white shirt with a ruffled collar and an apron with multiple bands of intricate silk needlework, embodies the exemplary figure of the neatly dressed, productive young woman. Similarly, Florentine sumptuary laws allowing contadine to wear silver-gilt buttons and silk ribbons only affected the most affluent members of the rural population. However, as suggested by the growing scrutiny of their appearances, dress held significant material and cultural value for rural women, to the extent that even a simple rectangle of linen cloth could be transformed into a tool for social leverage.