‘Knotted Histories: Early Modern Global Carpets, Global Exchange, and the Public Country House’ is a cross-sector collaborative project run between the Faculty of English at Oxford, the Ashmolean Museum, and the National Trust. It is funded by the John Fell Fund and will run from October 2025-September 2026. The project aims to reconsider cultural and global contexts of carpet production and their use beyond traditional approaches, with a renewed focus on craft makers and manufacturers alongside an examination of the cultural meaning of carpets across East and South Asia and Europe. ‘Knotted Histories’ will consider the role that these carpets played in increasingly global networks of commercial exchange through two National Trust case studies, Knole and Ham House, drawing also on the May Beattie archive held at the Ashmolean Museum and the National Trust’s wider collections.
The project has three main areas of research:
- Material Production and Circulation: How were carpets as portable artefacts exchanged and transferred between physical spaces, cultural and societal settings and geographical areas? What traces of circulation are preserved in current archival records? Where are the gaps and how can they be addressed?
- Information Production and Circulation: How can we open up conversations between traditions of carpet making as lived heritage and contemporary makers as living heritage? What is the impact of the prevalence of Eurocentric language in carpet cataloguing on our understanding of their histories? How can we better understand the physical qualities of early modern carpets in ways which are more cognisant of the non-European contexts in which they were created?
- Social Production and Circulation: How were carpets represented in art, literature and culture in early modern England? What are the challenges facing heritage institutions in reflecting this? What best practices can be adopted, and what sensitivities demand attention?
If you have any questions about the project or would like to hear more about its work, please do get in touch at emily.stevenson@ell.ox.ac.uk.
Future events associated with the project will be listed here – check back for more later!
