Seminar: Caring for Textiles: A Global History of Cleaning and Scenting from the Renaissance to the Modern Period

Mittwoch, 18.03.2026

Textiles have always required extensive care: washing, stain removal, deodorising, and perfuming shaped not only the longevity of fabrics but also broader cultural understandings of hygiene, sensory experience, and social norms. Today’s reliance on washing machines masks a long history of experimentation, labour, and changing ideas about how textiles should be cared for. This seminar will investigate how past societies cared for their clothes and household textiles, from cleaning to scenting, and explore what these practices reveal about historical notions of cleanliness and the material lives of fabrics. We will explore the maintenance of textiles in domestic settings as well as the specialised care reserved to symbolically charged fabrics, such as religious and ceremonial textiles. Drawing on scholarship that links bodily hygiene to the laundering of linens and the association of white fabrics with moral, spiritual, and medical virtues, the seminar will address the role of textiles in shaping notions of cleanliness and hygiene. Particular attention will be given to the ways these ideas intersected with concepts of race and whiteness in the colonial context. Attention will also be given to the evolution of cleaning materials and technologies – soap, stain-removal recipes, chemical innovations – and the ways they responded to fibre types, colour stability, and changing manufacturing techniques. Labour and expertise will constitute a key theme, from the embodied knowledge of laundresses to the gendered organisation of cleaning work. The sensory dimensions of textile maintenance will form another central point of discussion: we will explore how fabrics were touched, smelled, and how traditions of perfuming textiles and laundry materials shaped sensory expectations of freshness, cleanliness and pleasant scents.

Dozierende(r):	Dr. Moïra Dato
18.03.2026:	16:15 - 17:45
Ort:	3. Etage, Seminarraum 324 Uni Mittelstrasse Mittelstrasse 43

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