The study of medieval clothing and textiles has aroused great attention in recent years, as part of the growing concern in material culture as a whole; apart from its own intrinsic interest, it has much to reveal about life at the time. This exciting new series aims to offer all those interested in the subject the fruits of the best research in the area. Interdisciplinary in approach, it will feature work from the fields of social and economic history, history of techniques and technology, art history, archaeology, literary and non-literary texts, and language, while experimental...

Historical dress and textiles, always a topic of popular interest, has in recent years become an academic subject in its own right, transcending traditional genre boundaries. This annual journal includes in-depth studies from a variety of disciplines as well as cross-genre scholarship, representing such fields as social history, economics, history of techniques and technology, art history, archaeology, literature, and language. The contents cover a broad geographical scope and a range of periods from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Papers in this latest volume discuss clothing...

The third volume of this pioneering series explores the manufacture and trade of textiles and their practical, fashionable, and symbolic uses. Papers include in-depth studies and cross-genre scholarship representing such fields as social history, economics, art history, archaeology and literature, as well as the reconstruction of textile-making techniques. They range over England, Flanders, France, Germany, and Spain from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries, and address such topics as soft furnishings, ecclesiastical vestments, the economics of the wool trade, the making and use of narrow...

The fifth volume of this annual series features several articles examining the interaction of medieval romance with textiles and clothing. French Gothic ivory carvings illustrating courtly romances reveal details of fashionable dress; the distinct languages of narrative poetry and Parisian tax records offer contrasting views of medieval embroiderers; and scenes from the Tristan legend provide clues to the original form of the earliest surviving decorative quilt. Other papers look at ecclesiastical attempts to restrict extravagance in secular women's dress, the use of clothing references to...

The usual wide range of approaches to garments and fabrics appears in this tenth volume. Three chapters focus on practical matters: a description of the medieval vestments surviving at Castel Sant'Elia in Italy; a survey of the spread of silk cultivation to Europe before 1300; and a documentation of medieval colour terminology for desirable cloth. Two address social significance: the practice of seizing clothing from debtors in fourteenth-century Lucca, and the transformation of the wardrobe of Margaret Tudor, daughter of King Henry VII, upon her marriage to the king of Scotland. Two delve...

The second decade of this acclaimed and popular series begins with a volume that will be essential reading for historians and re-enactors alike. Two papers consider cloth manufacture in the early medieval period: Ingvild Oye examines the graves of prosperous Viking Age women from Western Norway which contained both textile-making tools and the remains of cloth, considering the relationship between the two. Karen Nicholson compliments this with practical experiments in spinning. This is followed by Tina Anderlini's close examination of the details of cut and construction of a...

The studies collected here range through art, artifacts, documentary text, and poetry, addressing both real and symbolic functions of dress and textiles. John Block Friedman breaks new ground with his article on clothing for pets and other animals, while Grzegorz Pac compares depictions of sacred and royal female dress and evaluates attempts to link them together. Jonathan C. Cooper describes the clothing of scholars in Scotland's three pre-Reformation universities and the effects of the Reformation upon it. Camilla Luise Dahl examines references to women's garments in probates and what they...

Three of the essays in this collection focus on Italy, with contributions on footwear in Lucca based on documentary evidence of the fourteenth century; aristocratic furnishings as described in a royal letter of the fifteenth century, along with its first translation into English; and Boccaccio's treatment of disguise involving Christian/Islamic identity shifts in his Decameron. The Bayeux Tapestry is discussed as a narrative artwork that adopts various costumes for semiotic purposes. Another chapter considers surviving artefacts: a detailed study of a piece of quilted fabric armour, one of...

The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines.