The Book as Mirror: Embroidered Bindings at the Court of Charles I

Abstract

Embroidered bindings were an important aspect of the culture of luxury goods associated with the Stuart court, and several surviving examples are associated with Charles’ queen Henrietta Maria, including one in the John Emmerson Collection, State Library Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Most unusually, this binding can be linked to a group of eight bindings identified to date as the work of one individual or workshop, held in the collections of SLV, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford and the British Library, London. This article will explore the relationships between these bindings as well as the cultural, gendered and material history of their production and their reception in seventeenth-century England. Regarding their reception, I will consider the books both as texts to be read in a literal sense, and texts that as objects, used form as well as iconography to encode directives about female royal behaviour within the richly symbolical and distinctive decorative culture of the Stuart court.