Reconstruction is becoming increasingly used as a tool by textile and clothing historians to understand extant garments. Historical knitted items have generally been overlooked by those studying textiles in depth, which is reflected in the lack of detail on these in most collections, including information on construction. This paper considers the usefulness of recreation of the knitted-in patterns on the medallions on backs of the hands and the cuffs of knitted liturgical gloves as a means of understanding their construction and production issues, and the skills their knitters needed, drawing on the examples in the Holy Hands database (kemeresearch.com).

Knitted liturgical gloves are high status items, solely used ceremonially by bishops and other senior churchmen in the western Christian church from the 12th century onwards. They were generally knitted to a fine gauge, using silk and metal threads, and often ornately embellished. These gloves are important items for the study of the history of knitting: especially those that date from the medieval and the early modern periods, as surviving high status knitted artefacts from those eras are very rare.

A few individual gloves have been briefly studied in the past, but the Holy Hands project, begun in 2020, is the first systematic survey of these gloves as knitted artefacts. Virtually nothing is known about those who knitted them; nor are there any contemporary records concerning their construction, hence the need to turn to reconstruction. The paper will discuss the rationale for identifying the selected aspects for recreation, and the parameters used, including the choice of yarn. It will reveal that the detailed examination involved in preparing for the recreations is as important as the actual recreation itself. Potential techniques for knitting the medallions will be discussed, as will the usefulness and practicalities of creating both knitted-in medallion and cuff patterns from a detailed examination of the original gloves. What the reconstruction process reveals about not only the skills of the knitters and the challenges they faced, and how their mindset might differ from that of a modern expert knitter will be considered, as will the possibility of identifying different workshops.