Gloves An Intimate History
by Anne Green published by Reaktion Books is an interesting, engaging book for sure! Gloves have always existed, or better, the man found ways for covering his hands in particular when there was bad weather or when in battle: but, of course the story of this accessory is more intense, fascinating, and captivating than what we can think at.
Gloves in the past represented honor, identity, status and power, but being a pair, love as well. Emisseries travelled and represented their King wearing his pair of gloves: why this? For giving more strength to the message that they had to communicate.
Gloves were also known in the most remote past. When the grave of Tutankhamun was discovered there was a pair of gloves, as new, in the coffin. I have seen the picture in the book related to them and they are like new!
Gloves were important also as a good presentation in the after-life and another symbol that couldn't be forgotten in the egyptian tradition.
Gloves can be stolen to a young girl living them as a portion of that beloved soul: gloves are in the Boccaccio's Decameron and for St. Birgitta, patron of Sweden, gloves had an articulated moral symbolism. If that saint tried to read gloves in a complicated way, St.Thomas Becket's gloves had healed a nun.
Gloves were important during business: the vendor of a land with witnesses would hand the purchaser a glove filled with the soil of that land: a sign of a good and solid contract, and seriety.
Let's go to Boston now, where lived mr Andrew Eliot pastor of the New North Church: gloves in 1700's were largely used also during the main ceremonies you can think at: christenings, weddings, funerals. Andrew like also his wife during that 32 years spent in the city, had accumulated 2.940 pairs of gloves! people discovered, surprised, after his death.
Pepys, London, 1660, in his famous diary largely tells stories on gloves.
It's in the XIX century that gloves had a lot of luck, declined only in the 1960s because of cheap labour provided in Asian countries.
French people loved gloves and to them they were an important accessory, but the French Revolution put down the Grenoble's glove industry: there were 6254 workers before the revolution, after the revolution, twenty years later, just 2.800.
Gloves with magical touch were described by Rabelais when he told to the reader that "that the vast gloves of his giant, Gargantua, were sewn from the skins of sixteen goblins
and trimmed with the fur of three werewolves."
Beautiful, fun and informative book, plenty of anecdocts from liteature, and curiosities, illustrations, pictures, histories, legends: the one of gloves, for what I discovered, is a magical, magical land of warmth and mystery at the same time.
Surprising!
Highly recommended.
I thank Reaktion Books fot the copy of the book.
Anna Maria Polidori
