Bodies and Gender Identities in the Making of Silk Fibre in Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract

This chapter analyses how gender ideologies shaped conceptualisations about how silk fibre was generated in seventeenth-century French sericultural texts. It argues that contemporary ideas about appropriate gender identities, roles, and hierarchies marked how silk fibre production was understood and promoted as a new opportunity for the French kingdom. Manuals of sericulture conceptualised the making of silk fibre as a process that involved human and non-human agency. As they articulated the relative power, knowledge, and skills of its varied agents, these authors wove assumptions borne of contemporary gender ideologies into early modern sericulture, and into ideas about its creative and entrepreneurial aspects.