Book of Hours: "The Church with Four Cardinal Virtues," folio B5v.

Silk was primarily brought to Paris from China, the Italian peninsula, and the Mediterranean during the thirteenth century. Once it arrived in the city, labourers would participate in a series of lengthy and complex rotational and dying procedures to generate a workable textile material.

Books of Hours were also predominantly associated with the spiritual reflection of Christian wealthy women, who would have likely resembled the beautifully dressed female figures in Hardouyn’s Book of Hours. Interestingly, silk processing and textile development practices that generated fabrics were all distinctly associated with female labour.

French education centres specializing in textile production were established in the 1500s to help teach this practice to young girls living in poverty. In addition, scholar Sharon Farmer has pointed out how tax assessments from the years 1292-1313 reveal that one hundred eighty-seven women were employed in professions that linked them to the various facets of silk cloth production; this was far more than the number of men (forty-seven) (Farmer, The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris 2016, 107). This distinct connection between female labour and Parisian textiles continued into subsequent centuries.