Seminar 1: MVC Seminar Series 2025

Seminar 1: Quilts as Sites of Collectivity. Rethinking the Prague Intarsia Patchwork Quilt (1790) Through Gender, Memory and Empire.

We’ll be meeting on Wednesday 8th October, 5-6pm GMT, online using Zoom. Sign up to receive the joining link and reminders. Registration closes 1 hour before seminar start time.

Abstract

The V&A houses a remarkable 1790 figurative patchwork quilt from the former Austrian Habsburg Empire. Created during a period of political uncertainty, the quilt reflects not only the personal emotions and memories of its makers but also the wider social, cultural, and political experiences of the time. As one of the few surviving Central European Intarsia quilts, the Prague Intarsia is a significant yet overlooked artefact that challenges assumptions about quilt-making as a gendered domestic craft. This quilt belongs to a distinctive genre of pictorial and geometric patchwork quilts, all made from heavy woollen fabrics by men, emphasising themes of military life, war, and patriotism, while also representing a broader cross-section of society arranged and organised within the quilt to convey certain messages. This paper presents the quilt as a “site of collectivity” to analyse its multiple layers of meaning across material, thematic, and receptive levels–from its origins in a tailor’s workshop to its reception within elite male-dominated audiences. This approach enables an examination of the quilt’s material composition alongside the diverse groups and communities it represents and engages. The quilt transcends traditional views of textiles as flat surfaces, appearing almost relief?like and thus presenting itself as a highly tactile object. Therefore, this paper also explores how, through its materiality, the quilt fosters a sense of belonging and identification among various collectives. Ultimately, this paper seeks to challenge ingrained gendered labour binaries linked to quilting and to expand the discourse on how quilts mediate memory, identity, and power.

Biography

Lisa Weishaupt is a recent graduate of the MSc programme in Global Premodern Art: History, Heritage, and Curation from the University of Edinburgh. She previously earned a Bachelor’s degree in History and Art History from the University of Basel (Switzerland). Weishaupt’s research interests centre on the visual and material culture of the 18th and 19th centuries, with a particular focus on textile and decorative arts, exploring themes such as war, colonialism, and patriotism. Currently, she is working with the Buccleuch Collection on a research project for the British and Irish Furniture Makers Online, managed by the Furniture History Society, which aims to reconstruct the Regency Dining Room of the now-lost Montagu House, Whitehall.