Summaries of papers dealing with embroidery, by members of the embroidery group, and
papers dealing with the trade to India:

as 8. A Fine Quality Insular Embroidery from Llan-gors Crannog, near Brecon

After water damage, the main piece which remained in Autun was entrusted to us for conservation treatment.
A study reveals the real state of the silk fabric worn and damaged as expected, but above all of a misleading appearance due to the previous conservation treatments. Around two main pieces, a multitude of small fragments are stucked on a support to simulate one-piece fabric. there are no valid reason to assume that this compact assemblage in a horizontal shape is the obvious one. A careful observation of the design composition led us to suggest a new one, which was accepted.

We hope to present here some chasubles recently discovered in Corsica. They bear witness to this passion for Turkish style which crossed the church thresholds in France and Italy, even climbing the choir step.

Nevertheless we will underline the paradox which lay for the priests in wearing chasubles made from Turkish fabric or of Turkish influence, when for the same representatives of the Church, the Turk is the enemy, the plunderer, the infidel....

This collection started in 1639 with the arrival of the first Ursulines who had come to Nouvelle-France, the French territories in Canada, to found a school with the aims of evangelising the American Indians and of educating French girls. Among its founding members, embroiderers like Marie de l'Incarnation produced liturgical vestments for their chapel and the surrounding churches.
Curiously, the designs used by the embroiderers were not drawn from the repertory of indigenous fauna and flora. Certain motifs came from the East via the Ursuliens of Tours or of Paris who sent their fellow sisters in Canada designs valued highly in the convents in France.

We will study this contradiction via the analysis of several liturgical vestments showing that the Ursulines of Quebec, sensitive to the taste for the East in fashion in Europe at the same time, ignored the exoticism of the fauna and flora all around them, favouring instead imported motifs and iconography.

During conservation a hypothesis was formulated about their provenance.

Embroiderers were the Renaissance artists who decorated liturgical vestments. Liturgical embroidery was a form of art in high demand during the Sixteenth century, not only because of the great number of churches built but also because of the number of liturgical vestments required for each specific ceremony and individually for each participant of the ceremony, as well. Liturgical vestments observed a very precise dress code specific in colors, fabrics, embroidery and iconography. The number of embroiderers in Salamanca during the Renaissance was very hight and the quality of ecclesiastical embroidery at its highest point. Salamanca's liturgical vestments were embellished with the highest quality silk and gold threads. Massive use of gold threads for the background is characteristic of these embroideries.

Today, some of Salamanca's churches and convents still hold magnificent examples of ecclesiastical vestments made in local workshops. Besides the embroidered vestments found in the churches, the main source of information for the study of artistic embroidery is the historical documentation preserved in the archives. The extraordinary amount of artistic documents that I found in Salamanca's local ecclesiastical and civil archives confirms the high quality and richness that this art archieved in Salamanca; and the important role played, both artistically and socially, by the embroiderers. The documents are embroiderers' commissions, embroiderers' exams, apprenticeships' contracts, embroiderers' wills, and workshops' inventories. The names of 88 embroiderers that lived and worked in Salamanca from 1482 to 1635 have emerged from those documents.