In 2018, the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Special Collections acquired a small and intriguing manuscript produced in the eighteenth century by Benedictine nuns at the St Godelieve Abbey in Bruges, Belgium. Across 30 handwritten leaves, with inserts of hand-painted designs as well as loose scraps of paper of various sizes, the manuscript gives written instructions in French and Dutch for how to dye textiles and create artificial flowers. The Benedictine motto ora et labora (“pray and work”) gives context for how flower making may have functioned in abbey life as a meditative form of handicraft. The manuscript also tells us more about botanical knowledge, craft skills, dyes, and the role of women in this realm of artistry.
The Artificial Flowers Project aims to translate, examine, and digitize this manuscript, as well as reconstruct some of the recipes within. Research is also being conducted on the wider context of the manuscript itself, the eighteenth-century culture of flowers and their intersection with dress and fashion, and the long tradition of artificial flower-making that continues into the present day.
Project Team
The project team is led by Sophie Pitman (Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist and Research Director of the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, Center for Design and Material Culture, UW–Madison) and Tianna Uchacz (Assistant Professor, College of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts, Texas A&M), and welcomes collaboration and engagement from across the UW campus and beyond.
Sophie Pitman
Position title: Pleasant Rowland Textile Specialist & Research Director
Email:
spitman
Phone: 608-262-3623
Tianna Helena Uchacz
Position title: Assistant Professor, Department of Visualization, Texas A&M University
Email:
thu
Artificial Flowers: Ora, Labora, et Flore
The project’s launch event in 2025, co-sponsored by the Center for Design and Material Culture and the Friends of the Libraries, brought together scholars, makers, and enthusiasts of Art History, Design Studies, English, French, German, History, History of the Book, History of Science, Medical History, Plant Sciences, Print and Digital Culture, Printmaking, and Religious Studies.
Objects from the Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection were presented alongside the manuscript, including eighteenth-century fashionable secular and religious garments decorated with flowers, samplers that link textile practice to spiritual work, and artificial flowers made of wool, silk, hair, paper, and feathers.
Objects above:
Wreath, 1880-1899, North America, silk and wool wrapped around metal, with glass beads, 14 x 12 x 3 in., Transferred from the Wisconsin State Historical Society, Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, D.C.US.0012b.
Chasuble, 1700–1765, France, metallic-wrapped silk and silk embroidery on woven silk, 42 x 27 in., Gift of Claudia Uihlein, Helen Louise Allen Textile Collection, E.A.E.1279.