DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.22262#0104
Madalena Braz Teixeira
The monks at the Monastery had always made their own hand-woven linen to
make religious vestments and their underclothes, and hand-woven wool for their
habits. Therefore, the presence of looms and other tools to manufacture textiles in
the Abbey is no surprise.
Apart from the monasterial weaving, we know that in the years 1774, 1786, 1792,
1815, factories operated at Alcobaęa, where skilled workers of English origin were
employed. Nevertheless, no details of the production of printed cloths are known.
An Italian named Balbi wrote on the subject in 1822, stating that the Portuguese
'.. .do a great deal of printing on Indian fabrics,' which is understandable sińce In-
dian cotton was imported at Iow prices. The first printing blocks must have come
from India. The manufacture of them reąuired a techniąue that Portuguese carpen-
ters, joiners and smiths had not yet mastered.
There is an extensive official list of printing factories (131) that existed in the coun-
try between 1750 and 1850, but Alcobaęa does not feature among them. The ma-
jority were in Lisbon, but there were printing factories in various localities too, in-
cluding on the other side of the Atlantic, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, probably because
the Portuguese court travelled to that country.
A military map dated 1835 contributes significantly to our knowledge of places
where chintz manufactures were located. Only two are mentioned as located in
Chelas, a borough in Lisbon. On the other hand, the official list above lists six in
Chelas and one in Xabregas, although the latter does not appear on the map. In
Campo Peąueno, Lisbon, one Casa de Fdbncas (Manufacturing House) is mentioned,
while the official list mentions two. The absence of references to the factories in
Alcobaęa is a mystery, the more so that the fame of them has survived till this day
One can conclude that the proliferation of factories was due in part to the wide-
spread taste for exotic designs and their polychrome effects, and the factories that
existed in the vicinity of convents and monasteries were probably not subject to of-
ficial registration. The same could perhaps be the case with smali private factories.
Manuał printing was freąuently performed on cotton cloths of rather poor ąuality,
for the decoration dissimulated the fragility of the cloth and it was at the same time
a way of creating a new and colourful product. The chintz is not a fabric, in fact, but
a painted cotton cloth. According to Oxford Dictionary the word comes from the
Hindu word chint used from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the Por-
tuguese brought the word chita, and its synonyms pintados ('painted') and całko,
which is Portuguese for Calicut, the Indian seaport now called Kozhikode in Kerala,
on the Malabar Coast south-west of Bangalore, from where the merchandise was sent
to Lisbon. We know that the pintados were brought from India on Vasco da Gama's
102
The monks at the Monastery had always made their own hand-woven linen to
make religious vestments and their underclothes, and hand-woven wool for their
habits. Therefore, the presence of looms and other tools to manufacture textiles in
the Abbey is no surprise.
Apart from the monasterial weaving, we know that in the years 1774, 1786, 1792,
1815, factories operated at Alcobaęa, where skilled workers of English origin were
employed. Nevertheless, no details of the production of printed cloths are known.
An Italian named Balbi wrote on the subject in 1822, stating that the Portuguese
'.. .do a great deal of printing on Indian fabrics,' which is understandable sińce In-
dian cotton was imported at Iow prices. The first printing blocks must have come
from India. The manufacture of them reąuired a techniąue that Portuguese carpen-
ters, joiners and smiths had not yet mastered.
There is an extensive official list of printing factories (131) that existed in the coun-
try between 1750 and 1850, but Alcobaęa does not feature among them. The ma-
jority were in Lisbon, but there were printing factories in various localities too, in-
cluding on the other side of the Atlantic, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, probably because
the Portuguese court travelled to that country.
A military map dated 1835 contributes significantly to our knowledge of places
where chintz manufactures were located. Only two are mentioned as located in
Chelas, a borough in Lisbon. On the other hand, the official list above lists six in
Chelas and one in Xabregas, although the latter does not appear on the map. In
Campo Peąueno, Lisbon, one Casa de Fdbncas (Manufacturing House) is mentioned,
while the official list mentions two. The absence of references to the factories in
Alcobaęa is a mystery, the more so that the fame of them has survived till this day
One can conclude that the proliferation of factories was due in part to the wide-
spread taste for exotic designs and their polychrome effects, and the factories that
existed in the vicinity of convents and monasteries were probably not subject to of-
ficial registration. The same could perhaps be the case with smali private factories.
Manuał printing was freąuently performed on cotton cloths of rather poor ąuality,
for the decoration dissimulated the fragility of the cloth and it was at the same time
a way of creating a new and colourful product. The chintz is not a fabric, in fact, but
a painted cotton cloth. According to Oxford Dictionary the word comes from the
Hindu word chint used from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the Por-
tuguese brought the word chita, and its synonyms pintados ('painted') and całko,
which is Portuguese for Calicut, the Indian seaport now called Kozhikode in Kerala,
on the Malabar Coast south-west of Bangalore, from where the merchandise was sent
to Lisbon. We know that the pintados were brought from India on Vasco da Gama's
102