Sieves in Ms. Fr. 640

Schuyler Gardner

Spring 2022, GU4962: Hands-on History

In early modern Europe, the line between tools used in workshops and in kitchens was blurred. Tools that crossed these spaces can reveal how people, particularly women, could negotiate their identities within different early modern spaces. In Ms. Fr. 640, there is a distinct interest in tools that rest at this intersection. Whether through the illustrations of furnaces (fol. 6v, fol.16r, fol.48r, fol. 100v, fol. 101r) or the emphasis on which specific pots are to be employed in particular processes (such as a “leaded pot” on fol. 3r or “a varnished earthenware pot” on fol. 48v), the author-practitioner displays both a knowledge of and interest in how tools traditionally marked as belonging within the kitchen were used more broadly. One tool, the sieve, seems to receive particular attention from the author-practitioner. For example, “Horsehair sieves” (fol. 44v) provides a very detailed description of the process of creating and trading sieves:

They are made at Coustance in Normandy with horse tail hair which they clean with lye because they sort them with the mouth & separate out short & broken ones. They do not make the reed longer than the sieve, & the reed is round. They attach to both edges of the reed the hair, either black or white, according to the work they want to make. And the weft is [is] done over & under as for making any other fabric. And passing a small flat stick of ii or three fingers wide between, next they pass two hairs at each step of the pedal and weave with three pedals. There are xviic hairs in the entire sieve. They sell them by the dozen & each dozen xxx sous. They bring them to Toulouse to transport them afterward to Spain, and take silk tammy in exchange for it.

Out of a multitude of tools, from ovens to spoons to pots and pans, the sieve is the one of the few actively used within the author-practitioner’s experiments that has an entry dedicated to its creation process. This attention alerts us to how such intersectional cooking and experimental tools helped shape female identity in early modern Europe. Indeed, an analysis of the sieve reveals its dual nature for female identity, as it allows space for female agency through its production while reinforcing control over female bodies through its imagery.

The Use of Sieves in Ms. Fr. 640

Through its focus on sieves, this essay aims to examine the extent to which women were able to insert themselves into male spaces of experiential labor such as workshops, thus its prominence in Ms. Fr. 640 can shed light on its use in such spaces. Within the manuscript, the use of a sieve is mentioned over forty times, and is used in a wide array of processes. From making bread (“For making millas,” fol. 20r) to working with metal (“Grain of lead,” fol. 49v) to preparing hourglass powder (“Powder for hourglasses,” fol. 10r), sieves are a ubiquitous and versatile tool throughout the manuscript. However, the sieve’s most common use is in experimentation with molding materials (“sands”) for casting metals. The entry, “That any sand can be rendered good” (fol. 90r - 90v), for instance, displays how, through sieving, most sand can be turned into sand for molding:

However, you can be certain that in all places you can render the sand from a mine good & proper for molding. For if it is coarse, pass it through a sieve.

Additionally, the entry “Sand” (fol. 69r) mentions a sieve for the process of creating molding material to cast objects into:

…It is dried slightly on the [illegible] fire, then it is pestled & passed finely through a double sieve or a linen sleeve…

The author-practitioner also takes sand from Toulouse and refines it for casting in “Experimented sands” (fol .85v):

…I have experimented with sand from Th{oulous}e, & after reheating it well twice, in a skillet, I passed it through a fine sieve, like the apothecaries’ double, without finely grinding it further on the porphyry, as I have done previously…

This preparation of sand for different activities may be behind some of the over one hundred and eighty mentions of the word “sand” within the manuscript. Thus, we can infer that even when the sieve is not explicitly mentioned, entries surrounding the testing processes of “casting” and “molding” in which certain sands are integral may have used a sieve in the preparation, revealing the sieve as an integral part of the experimentation process of Ms. Fr. 640.

Women’s Role in Providing Sieves in the Home

Sieves played an integral role in the male-dominated spaces of workshops, but sieves were also an important implement in domestic space.¹ Through their study of marriage and death inventories from southwest Germany starting in the sixteenth century, Sheilagh Ogilvie, Markus Küpker, and Janine Maegraith found that this culinary instrument held immense social importance to women. For example, their study of sieves used to make traditional German mussel-cakes (Mutscheln) shows that sieves appeared in 16% of marriage inventories, where they were mainly brought into the marriage by women.² In addition, 17% of first-time brides brought such sieves into their marriage across a wide range of social categories, showing no notable difference in ownership depending on social status.³

There is also evidence that women played a role in producing sieves through apprenticeships. While French women had worked in guilds and recognized professions before the sixteenth century, the period from 1550 to 1700 brought a dramatic decrease in documented jobs as, according to historian Natalie Davis, “changes in marriage laws restricted the freedom of wives even further, as female guilds dwindled, as the female role in middle-level commerce and farm direction contracted, and as the differential between male and female wages increased.”⁴ However, many historians have theorized that such changes may not have had such a detrimental effect as documented. For instance, in reaction to laws that tightened the grip on women’s responsibilities under male-run guilds, women, particularly in the textile industry such as linen drapers and hemp merchants, created female run guilds.⁵ Thus, according to historian Clare Crowston, “at the precise moment in history taken as the culmination of their linear decline, therefore, French women obtained new, independent guilds.”⁶ One place in which women did not seem to lose agency, and even perhaps gained authority, was Rouen, Normandy. Upon examining Rouen documents, historian James B. Collins noted that twenty out of thirty-six linen merchants from sixteenth-century Rouen were women.⁷ Additionally, Collins discovered that three of the forty-six richest merchants in Rouen were women. While not in the town of manufacturing described in “Horsehair sieves” on fol. 44v of Ms. Fr. 640 (“Coustance in Normandy”), Rouen being within Normandy shows that such female-run businesses still existed in surrounding areas.

Since resources are scarce regarding French women’s participation in apprenticeship, it may be beneficial to examine details of women’s well-documented work in England to determine the female role in sieve production. Female apprenticeships hit their peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, being particularly popular amongst lower status women as gender divisions were less pronounced.⁸ This can be seen in the early modern poor laws such as The Act of Elizabeth (1601), which laid the terms for parish apprenticeships, as it makes clear the ages required to maintain in an apprenticeship for both sexes, stating “Till such Man-child shall come to the Age of four and twenty Years and such a Woman-child to the age of one and twenty Year, or the Time of her Marriage.”⁹ Records of donations distributed amongst commoners are also informative, such as Transcription of the “Poor Book” of the tithings of Westbury-on-Trym, Stoke Bishop and Shirehampton from A.D. 1656-1698, which documents money being given to a pipe-maker for his training of a female apprentice, stating money was “payd Thomas Grant of Westbury pipe maker wh Due to him in taking Martha Andrewes apprentice.”¹⁰ With female apprentices being relatively frequent in early modern England, some historians, such as Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, have identified a wide range of occupations these women took, including sieve maker. Having studied the London Company Records in their work, Women in early modern England, 1550-1720, Mendelson and Crawford found that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century middle class women were apprenticed in occupations such as “carpenter, draper, mercer, caper, weaver, plumber, whittawer, cordwainer, silversmith, baker, fringe-maker, sieve-maker, housepainter, and pipe-maker.”¹¹ Additionally, a study of the Consistory Courts of Early Modern London done by historian Peter Earl found that of the women who were documented as occupied from 1695 to 1725, eighteen were classified as “miscellaneous manufacture,” which Earl clarifies as “two chair-caners, two fanmakers, one engraver on stone, and one each who made bellows, bricks, flasks, pipes, pottery, sacks, and sieves.”¹² This fact of women in the production of sieves meant that they not only used sieves in the kitchen, but also provided the tools for the labor of workshops.

The Social Meaning of Sieves

While sieves were thus part of women’s agency within the experiential spaces of kitchen and workshop, they also held great symbolism in relation to women’s bodies, which may have been in force during the time of the author-practitioner. The sieve’s symbolic meaning reaches back to the story of the Roman Vestal Virgin Tuccia. On being accused of infidelity, Tuccia was forced to prove her innocence by collecting water from the Tiber river in a sieve and carrying it to the Temple of Vesta without spilling.¹³ According to the story, she accomplished this task and proved her purity. The sieve thus came to be employed in Europe as a symbol of female chastity. In her work, Around the Sieve. Motif, Symbol, Hermeneutic, historian Barbara Baert explains that this story “articulates the woman as water that is retained, as an impermeable and therefore untouched hymen. The sieve now becomes a receptacle, a water pitcher.”¹⁴ This story’s popularity is visible in multiple artistic renderings, one of the most popular being the “Sieve Portraits” of Queen Elizabeth I, who holds a sieve to signal her chastity. During the failed marriage negotiations between Queen Elizabeth I and Francis, Duke of Anjou, the sieve portraits were created to display her chastity and argue that such purity proved her political righteousness, presenting her as a “New Tuccia.”¹⁵ The first portrait, known as the Plimpton Sieve Portrait (fig. 1), painted in 1579 by George Gower, ties the sieve to Elizabeth’s body, literally and metaphorically entwining this tool and her chastity with her body. Created in 1583 by Quentin Mestys, the Siena Sieve Portrait (fig. 2) similarly asserts her purity with a sieve, and goes further by including a depiction of the story of Aenead and Dido in the background, a story that also highlights righteousness through chastity.¹⁶ These portraits use the female body to argue that virginity can be identified with political power: if Queen Elizabeth I remains an ideal image of a woman as a virgin, she may maintain her political power, thus arguing for Queen Elizabeth I’s rightful place on the throne. In the Plimpton Sieve Portrait (fig. 1), for instance, there is a globe in the left corner, which resembles the sieve’s shape and position, reinforcing her involvement in worldly conquests. Inscriptions on both the globe and sieve also allude to Elizabeth’s ability to rule, because, like a sieve, she is able to sift right from wrong to make the best decisions for her realm: the sieve contains a quote from Pertrach’s Trionfo d’amore, “wearied rest and rested weariness,” while the globe reads, “I see everything but much is lacking.”¹⁷

Fig. 1: George Gower, Plimpton Sieve Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, 1579. Oil on wood, 104.4 cm × 76.2 cm. The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, https://catalog.folger.edu/record/128729.

Fig. 2: Quentin Mestys, The Siena Sieve Portrait, ca. 1583. © Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) in Ceremonial Costume (oil on canvas), Zuccari, or Zuccaro, Federico (1540-1609) / Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, Italy / Bridgeman Images.

While the Sieve Portraits are perhaps the most famous examples, the French manuscript Livres des quatre vertus (Book of Virtues), shows that the sieve as a tool for deciphering chastity, through which women could claim power and agency, was alive in France before the Sieve Portraits’ creations. Livres des quatre vertus is a manuscript from 1450 collected by Sir John Fastolf. Fol. 4v is particularly intriguing as it contains an illustration centered on the virtue of Prudence (fig. 3), one of the Four Virtues in Christian thought, along with Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance. In this illustration, Prudence has three maidens on either side of her, and she stands on a sack of gold coins, holds a handscroll and a mirror, and has a coffin on her head. Still, the sieve she carries is the most interesting object because, according to Kevin Timpe and Craig Boyd, Prudence is “a ‘bridge virtue,’ connecting reason and judgment with moral activity.”¹⁸ Thus, the use of a sieve to symbolize Prudence’s quality of separating the moral from the unrighteous displays French awareness of such association with the sieve. While the Cardinal Virtues are almost always portrayed as women, the particular association here of the female Prudence with a sieve solidifies both female associations with the tool and women’s connection to these qualities.

Fig 3: Livres des quatre vertus (Book of the Four Virtues) illuminated by Sir John Fastolf, 1450, University of Oxford, http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk and https://library.artstor.org/asset/BODLEIAN_10310373019.

In addition, a calendar page from a Rouen Book of Hours (1490-1500), provides concrete evidence of France’s association of sieves with virginity as well as with fertility. Books of Hours contain a set of prayers for the Virgin Mary to be recited at particular times of day, known as the “Hours of the Virgin.”¹⁹ Calendars often appeared at the beginning of such works so that the owner could keep track of holy days and feasts, and the calendars were usually ornamented with zodiac signs and/or an activity associated with that month.²⁰ For August of this work, the calendar is decorated with one illustration on the left of a man shaking grain in a sieve and, on the bottom, a woman presumed to be a personification of the zodiac sign Virgo (fig. 4). These two images reinforce the association between sieves and female virginity. In numerous cultural stories, the virgo is characterized as pure innocence which often becomes associated with virginity.²¹ Due to this association, it was popular to associate the sign Virgo with the Virgin Mary during the early modern period.²² Therefore, the use of a sieve does not just denote an activity done during this time of year—harvesting and threshing—but alludes to the connection of the Virgo with virginity, especially considering this was a book of prayers specifically directed to the Virgin Mary.

Fig. 4: The Month of August, “Book of Hours” (1490–1500), Princeton University Library, Garrett Ms. 56, fol. 4v, by unidentified woman, https://library.artstor.org/asset/PRINCETON_MANUSCRIPTS_1031319958.

This Rouen Book of Hours also denotes another common association with sieves and womanhood during the early modern period: the use of sieves to symbolize the time of harvesting and fertility. Women were connected to sieves through their shared ability to provide sustenance and life. The typically female-dominated environment of food, procreation, and protection, Beret argues, “resides in the essence of the sieve itself as a permeable membrane that brings cleanness and separates the desired foodstuff from contaminants.”²³ This imagery of providing food began to be connected to the idea of the harvest, as both provide the necessities for sustaining life. While Virgo is associated with multiple myths, almost all similarly connect her to agriculture and fertility. Within Greek and Roman mythology, Virgo is connected to the goddess of Harvest, Demeter.²⁴ In Egyptian mythology, the wheat harvest began when the sun moved into the Virgo constellation.²⁵ Thus, it is possible to infer that the male figure sieving grain in the Rouen Book of Hours refers to the qualities of both the zodiac and the harvest. It is interesting to note that the entry “Baker” (fol. 88r) in Ms. Fr. 640*,* details a similar process of purifying food in order to keep it edible, detailing that to keep “wheat from becoming infested with weevils,” you must “pass ashes through the sieve & mix them with the wheat.” Therefore, it is apparent that this notion of the sieve’s use in ensuring nutrition and sustenance was on the mind of the author-practitioner.

Conclusion

By examining the use, production process, and social meanings behind this tool that sat at the intersection of cooking and workshop spaces during the early modern period, it makes clear that women were involved in more than just the kitchen use of the sieve. In particular, the sieve’s frequent use in a wide variety of workshop experiments, its production and significance within the household and workspace for women, as well as its use as a symbol and signifier of female virginity, morality, and fertility, all display how this tool both allowed women’s roles in the experimental spaces of kitchen and workshop, while also signifying control of their bodies in popular imagery. This dual meaning inhabited early modern experimental and culinary spaces and thus may help explain the author-practitioner’s particular interest in the tool as displayed in the entry “Horsehair sieves” on fol. 44v.

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