Join us for an evening with Mary Ann Williams, editor of the new book Textiles of Ireland. Mary Ann will be talking us through her research and her journey to editingTextiles of Ireland followed by a Q&A session where you can ask questions and chat to Mary Ann.
About Textiles of Ireland
Spanning the life’s work of archaeologist Elizabeth Wincott Heckett, Textiles of Ireland: Archaeology, craft, art is the first wide-ranging book on the archaeological textiles of Ireland published since 1989. The volume includes studies of cloth found in bogs, burials, hoards, sacked castles, docklands and fallen city walls. These include a mysterious weaving of horsehair, dating from before 800 BC; imprints of cloth wrappings on the weapons of a buried Viking warrior, and the exquisite liturgical textiles, inspired by the Book of Kells, embroidered in 1916 for the Honan Chapel at University College Cork. Including an overview of best practice used by archaeologists encountering textiles in the field, accompanying illustrations and imagery, glossary and charts, this book is essential reading for archaeologists, historians and anyone intrigued by the threads that bind Ireland’s past to its present.
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About Mary Ann Williams
Mary Ann Williams is a writer and editor who specialises in writing about heritage. She has a lifelong interest in textiles, archaeology and textile history.
In Ireland her clients have included St Patrick’s Cathedral, the County Museum, Dundalk, the Tullamore Dew Heritage Centre and the Heritage Officers of Counties Laois and Offaly. She edited and shaped the text of Stories from a Sacred Landscape:Croghan Hill to Clonmacnoise (Caimin O’Brien, Mercier 2005), a book about monastic sites in Offaly. In the United States, her clients have included the Field Museum of Natural History, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Shedd Aquarium.
She met Wincott Heckett while doing research on an historical novel about spinning, set in Early Christian Ireland.