Cultures of Mending

In John Taylor’s needlework pattern book The Needles Excellency (1631), the water poet appends a poem, ‘The prayse of the Needle’, which equates domestic labour with the weapons of war: ‘It is a Taylors Iavelin, or his Launce / And for my Countries quiet, I should like, / That woman-kinde should vse no other Pike’ (A1^r). The woman at work on her ‘crosse-stitch’ and ‘Raisd-worke’ (A2^r) is wielding the arms of her sex, the needle with its sharp point a diminutive cousin to the battle-ready ‘Launce’ or ‘Pike’. A correspondence reinforced by the title page’s image of a woman representing ‘Industrie’ who holds her needle aloft (Figure 15.1), its sharp point echoed by the sword carried by a retreating male figure in the background. Given that the tools of needlework, whether the needle or the pin, had the capacity to deliver injury in the form of prickings, this militaristic analogy seems apt, even if it does figure the woman who wields the needle as a weak counterpart to the soldier, making it clear that she is destined to serve only on a domestic front.