Join RSN Curator of Textiles, Dr Isabella Rosner, as she explores the samplers, workboxes, and embroidered accessories of early modern Quaker girls educated in and around the City of London. Surviving examples are surprisingly decorative, contrasting with the plainness that was a tenet central to the Society of Friends from its founding in the 1650s. This talk uses objects across a variety of collections to survey possible reasons for this intriguing aesthetic contradiction.

Isabella recently received her PhD from King’s College London, where she studied Quaker women’s needlework, waxwork, and shellwork in seventeenth and eighteenth-century London and Philadelphia. Isabella was named a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker in 2023.