The Trousseau

Title: The Trousseau

General Information about Item:

  • Material Folklore: Clothing/Linens
  • Italian, English
  • Italy

Informant Data:

  • Nancy Canepa has been an Italian professor at Dartmouth College since 1989. She is descended from Italian immigrants on her father’s side. Her paternal grandmother is from the Lombardy region of Italy, and her paternal grandfather is from the Liguria coast. She has attended two Italian weddings. Her husband is from the Apulia region of Italy.

Contextual Data:

  • Social/Cultural Context: It is customary for the bride at an Italian wedding to collect a trousseau – a box of embroidered linens and garments, which, according to Professor Canepa, are usually handmade by the bride’s female relatives. Once married, the husband and wife bring this set of linens home with them. According to Professor Canepa, the custom of presenting the bride with a trousseau is more common in the south of Italy.

Item:

  • The bride at an Italian wedding usually receives a trousseau. The informant noted that the items in the trousseau are very elaborately decorated because the value of the trousseau is associated with the success of the marriage.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Transcript of Associated File:

  • “Something that the… that the bride brings to her new married life – this still exists in some parts of the Italian south, which, as I mentioned before, you know is more steeped in tradition and is more connected, even today, to those traditions – is a uh – it’s called a ‘corredo’ in Italian – a trousseau – we usually use the French word – which is a big box full of very carefully, preciously prepared um lingerie, bed linens, table linens that traditionally have been prepared and usually very finely embroidered by sometimes, to some degree, the bride herself, but mostly her female relatives – her mother, her grandmother, her aunts. And so the bride would bring this big box of linens that the bride and groom would then use in their new house um and the richness of the trousseau was symbolically a, you know, connected to the… to the richness and success of the marriage – um so that’s not a gift that they get, but it’s something that is giftlike that the wife brings to the marriage.”

Informant’s Comments:

  • The informant believes that the richness of the trousseau is associated with the “richness and success of the marriage.” Therefore, it is important to have elaborately embroidered linens to ensure the material wealth of the couple. The informant did not consider the trousseau a wedding gift – probably because the bride sometimes makes the items in the trousseau herself – but said that it is ‘giftlike.’

Collector’s Comments:

  • It is possible that the embroidered linens are associated with fertility since they are used on the couple’s bed. The linens could also be a sign of wealth or status if they are purchased rather than handmade. The linens in the trousseau are an example of contagious magic since, as Professor Canepa mentioned, it is believed that the couple will become rich as a result of using richly decorated linens.

Collector’s Name: Peter Loomis

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