Material Marketing: How Lyonnais Silk Manufacturers Sold Silks, 1660–1789

Abstract

Textiles are products that rely for their effect on colour, texture, handle or drape, and sometimes on pattern, too. Such physical and aesthetic qualities determine their end use and are difficult to represent satisfactorily in black and white, in either words or images. Despite this fact, the exploration of the selling of textiles by historians of the early modern period has tended to rely on printed and manuscript sources. This focus on text and image has perhaps obscured the variety of methods used to sell textiles internationally and the skills and experience of salesmen who were not necessarily shopkeepers.¹ Most selling activity is, of course, notoriously difficult to pin down because it uses oral communication and is often peripatetic, taking place at the site of production or consumption or somewhere in between.² Its practitioners are not prominent in the annals of guilds or cities because they were frequently absent from home on business or were just passing through the towns where they sought custom. Moreover, the tools of their trade were ephemeral and transitory, their use often deliberately shrouded in secrecy. Exploration of commercial correspondence and analysis of surviving merchants’ sample books, however, pay dividends. In the case of the Lyon silk manufactures, they may be read in conjunction with the deliberations of the Chamber of Commerce, the regulations, deliberations and procedures of the silk weaving guild (the Grande Fabrique) and notarial acts. They highlight the significance of the material (silk samples) over the graphic (print and drawings) in enabling Lyonnais silk manufacturers to make and retain connections with their international and domestic markets.