Jane I think crediting Barbara Uttman as "inventor" of bobbin lace is definitely incorrect. What she may have done was to establish a lace school in her town, thereby making it a lace making center. I wouldn't use Mrs. Palliser as a respectable source. She was writing in the late 19th century. I have her book. My impression of her is that she tried to look like a scholar, and may have thought of herself that way: she does give references for her sources (letters, town archives, etc.). But she had no way of going outside the written comments of various people to verify the look and appearance of the kinds of laces they were talking about. She never worked out a way of going to outside visual sources to demonstrate how lace designs changed over time, or to nail down the time period when a particular lace was made by comparing it to other firmly dateable visual sources. So, basically she is not much use. (I spent 6 years in graduate school studying history, and I do know how to do historical research, and I do know what distinguishes a good historian from a bad one.)
Please keep in mind the solid dates we do have. LePompe was published in 1559. Barbara Uttman was born in 1514. So she was 45 when LePompe was published. LePompe show a state of bobbin lace which is already by then quite developed and complex. The book has what are clearly braid based (plait based) laces, tape laces, and what look a lot like torchon. So much profusion of invention in one lifetime is hard to believe. But what Santina Levey says is that she disbelieves the story that Barbara Uttman brought bobbin lace to Germany for the first time. The grounds she gives for disbelieving the story is that this story first appeared in the 19th century. If no earlier writer ever said such a thing, or if there is no contemporary evidence (contemporary meaning from the same time span as Barbara Uttman's lifetime) one has to wonder if 19th century writers made it up. Please do understand that professional historians are always asking the question "did this writer make up the story", or "did this writer use a letter written by somebody who didn't know what he was talking about and had no access to the truth". What historians do isn't to memorize dates, but to try and reason their way through a mass of evidence, reviewing for each piece whether the writer was in a position to know the truth from having been there, from having access to written documents from people who are known to have been there, whether the writer had some kind of bias (such as politics, national or regional chauvinism, religious or ideological) which would make his judgments questionable. There are a long list of historical events and personages who have been subjected to this kind of questioning investigation. There are known ancient writers, Plutarch for instance, who statements are generally not believed because they don't pass the test I listed above. People who write books do make things up sometimes. Republicans typically refuse to believe environmentalists and those yelling about global warming. They attribute these attitudes to an anti-business bias. This is a case of a bunch of people using the bias argument to disregard a range of opinions which would put restrictions on their activities (rightly placed restrictions, I think). Democrats accuse republicans of refusing to regulate the prices of prescription medications because of receiving donations from drug manufacturers. ETc. These are all situations where motivations are being questioned. The same goes with writing history. The problem with 19th century writers of lace history is that most of them were not professional historians, didn't have access to documents which might contain some bits of truth, and mostly because they just wanted to spice up the story. Lorelei - To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
