'A Marketplace in Miniature: Norwich Pattern Books as Cultural Agency', Proceedings of the Textile Society of America 11th Biennial Symposium 2008: Textiles as Cultural Expressions.

This conference contribution, published by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln in the Proceedings of the Textile Society of America, considers textile as cultural agency and textiles as agents and signifiers of cultural formation. It examines ways in which textile systems and visual semantics intersect with economic, social, political, technical, linguistic and consumer interests. The research questions addressed in the publication arose from work for the Norwich Textile Project (a collaboration with Norwich Castle Museums, 2004 - ongoing) together with on-going research into the wider field of textile culture as a significant component of material culture. The publication considers the visual evidence of an exceptional resource (18th century books of samples, in Norwich, London and Winterthur, Delaware) for understanding production, trade and developing consumerism in relation to 18th century pre-industrial textiles. Although there has been significant research in this field, the evidence of the samples themselves has been little studied; reflection on and evaluation of the visual evidence is supported here by critical insights from material culture and 18th century studies of consumerism. In the light of the paper a number of garments and large samples from collections in the United States, many as yet unpublished, have been identified. Evidence of these was presented in a paper ‘From pattern sample to wedding dress: an example from eighteenth century Norwich’ at the International Pasold / Chord conference ‘Distribution Networks for Textiles and Dress 1700-1945’ convened at the University of Wolverhampton, (09.2010). A further paper ‘“The only true book”: patterns of exchange between text and textile in catalogues of samples from eighteenth-century Norwich’ was presented at the ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference organised by the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts, held at Jesus College, University of Cambridge (08.2012)