Time and Ancient Textiles

Marie-Louise Nosch, former director of the Centre for Textile Research at the Saxo Institute of the University of Copenhagen, joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book Time of Textiles in Ancient Greece (DeGruyter 2025).

If you like this episode, you might also enjoy Lesche episode 1.10, "Wedding Poetics in Ancient Greek Literature," with Andromache Karanika.

Ancient texts

• Homer, Iliad and Odyssey (lots of weaving scenes)
• Hesiod, on the creation of Pandora (Theogony and Works and Days)
• Aeschylus, Libation Bearers (the "recognition scene" also parodied in Euripides' Electra)
• Euripides, Ion (on Creusa's "sampler" as recognition token)
• Thucydides 1.6 (on ancient Ionian dress)
• The "Old Oligarch"/[Xenophon] Constitution of the Athenians 1.10 (on the indistinguishability of free and enslaved persons on the basis of dress in Athens)

Modern bibliography

• Andersson Strand, Eva and Mannering, Ulla. 2021. “Sailmaking. A Gigantic Collective Undertaking”, in Jeanette Varberg and Peter Pentz (eds.), The Raid. Join the Vikings, 29 – 44. Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark.
• Brøns, Cecilie. 2016. Gods and Garments: Textiles in Greek Sanctuaries in the 7th to the 1st Centuries BC. Oxbow.
• Bücher, Karl. 1896. Arbeit und Rhythmus. Leipzig: Teubner.
• Karanika, Andromache. 2014. Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Pantelia, Maria C. 1993. “Spinning and Weaving. Ideas of Domestic Order in Homer”, The American Journal of Philology 114 no. 4, 493 – 501.

About our guest

Marie Louise Nosch studied Ancient Greek History in Nancy and Naples and completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Salzburg. Her special field of research is Aegean epigraphy and Mycenaean Linear B inscriptions, as well as ancient textile production. She was the Director of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre for Textile Research (2005-2016) at the University of Copenhagen and has been Professor of Ancient Greek History at the University of Copenhagen since 2011. She was elected to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2017 and served as President from 2020-2024.

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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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