Although relatively few cabinets of this type have survived, there are comparable examples in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, dated to the third quarter of the seventeenth century (http://data. fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/77903); and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which may date from the 1650s (ht tps://collections.lacma.org/node/2487 16). The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, holds a number of embroidered caskets and cabinets including that by Martha Edlin, dated to 1671 (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O11096/ embroidered-casket-edlin-martha/). There are some rare unfinished cabinet panels from the second half of the seventeenth century in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York (https://www.metmuseum.org/art /collection/search/230014) which allow us to gain some knowledge of the processes which went into completing these works. They show the different panels which were worked on a single piece of cloth and then cut so that they could be attached to the cabinet.

In most cases, it is not possible to identify the embroiderer. Where the embroiderer can be named, she was young. Martha Edlin was eleven years old when she made her cabinet and Hannah Smith was about fourteen when she completed hers and sent the embroidered panels from Oxford to London where they were assembled professionally. She left an account of the making of the casket in a note found in one of the drawers.

Embroidery compositions and motifs were often taken from printed material – Bible illustrations, images in natural history books, and sheets of designs specifically printed to be used as embroidery patterns. The stitching techniques on these seventeenth century cabinets and caskets vary. Hannah Smith used tent – parallel diagonal stitches; rococo – a complex stitch resulting in a diamond shape, and also known as queen stitch; satin – a flat stitch used to completely cover the underlying fabric; and long and short – varying lengths of simple stitching used to create patterns.

The narrative scenes on these embroidered cabinets and caskets were frequently taken from the Old Testament and focused on female protagonists. The story of Rebecca was popular in domestic needlework and is told on a casket in the Victoria and Albert Museum (https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O132888/embroidered-casket/) as well on the Bourne Casket in the collections of the Lancashire Museums (http://collections.lancsmuseums.gov.uk/Display.php?irn=635&QueryPage=%2F Query.php). Biblical women such as Rebecca could have been considered suitable role models for the young women embroidering their stories. Rebecca, for example, was seen as a paradigm for married women. By continuing to draw enough water at the well to satisfy all the camels in Abraham’s household, she proved that she was willing to work hard (Genesis 24:1–27). The time taken to complete the embroidery panels also demonstrated that the young woman testing her skills in the mid-seventeenth century was industrious.

Hannah Smith chose Deborah and Yael as her main subjects. Deborah instigated the uprising against Jabin, ruler of Canaan, by encouraging Barak to engage in battle against his general, Sisera. After Sisera was defeated he fled the battlefield and reached the tent of Yael where, when he fell asleep, she killed him by hammering a tent peg into his head. Representations of Yael tended to concentrate on the moment when she is about to use the tent peg to pierce Sisera’s skull and Hannah Smith’s embroidery is no exception. Both Deborah and Yael were instrumental in the defeat of Sisera. Rather than follow, they led: indeed Barak had refused to go into battle unless Deborah accompanied him. Deborah prophesied that because of this, the Lord would ‘deliver Sisera into the hands of a woman’ (Judges 4:9). Hannah Smith’s embroidery skills would have helped to make her marriageable. Her subject matter chosen shows married women as powerful and pro-active in protecting their people.

Katy Ellis & Cordelia Warr, University of Manchester