Digital Microscopy and Early Modern Embroidery

Which insights might historians gain when studying early modern material culture through digital microscopy? I here consider a seventeenth-century German embroidered sampler now at the Whitworth, The University of Manchester, UK, to argue that digital microscopy helps recalibrating our understanding of the matter and making of early modern embroidery, and how it was experienced on a sensory level. The microscope prompts historians to reconsider making and viewing conventions, and the emotional responses that the early modern transformation of materials could evoke among contemporaries. Microscopes are important heuristic tools to better capture the dynamics of what has been called the ‘material Renaissance’, a period characterised by the appreciation of cultures of making, craft knowledge and innovation, as well as manual expertise that displayed and transformed materials.