Medieval Clothing and Textiles

Medieval Feminist Forum, 2007

2002

T he New Middle Ages contributes to lIvely transdisClplInary conversations in medieval cultural stuches through Its scholarly monographs and essay collections. This series provides new work In a contemporary idiom about preCIse (if often dIverse) practIces, expresslOns, and ideologies in the MIddle Ages. This volume, the thirty-first in the series, continues a concern expressed In an earlIer series volume, Robes and Honor; edited by Stewart Gordon, with ways that material culture, in this case ceremonial dress, encodes but also ambiguates significant cultural symbolIcs. That volume invited us to think about robing as a "ceremonial metalanguage," but they also remind us that robes themselves as well as robing ceremonials have particular, local resonance. In Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images, editors Desiree Koslin and Janet Synder have assembled a rich range of surviving examples of dreSSIng-across time, In dIfferent medIa, up and down the social ladder, across professions, and between genders-and the essays In this volume delineate the details while also interrogating the relatlOn of the represented to the "real." We see keenly how in clothing alone the users/representers embody cultures, with a touch of the antIque here, a foray Into the foreign exotic there, and a constant con-sClOusness of the body as the basic SIte for human display.

Parergon, 2006

Book Review of Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook, ed. by LOUISE M. SYLVESTER, MARK C. CHAMBERS and GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014).

Journal of British Studies, 2011

2009

This thesis puts under examination the linguistic and non-verbal elements of early medieval clothing on the basis of semiotic systems that pertain to the use and function of early medieval textiles in Francia and Anglo-Saxon England. An attempt is made here to address the possibilities in the research of the diverse messaging systems which reflect social roles and identities communicated visually through dress and dress accessories. In the course of this examination the relationship of early medieval people with dress and their concepts about their bodies is explored. While seeking to establish the most important elements in the structure of early medieval dress, we will also try to explore and deploy the methodologies of corporeal semantics, the criteria of visibility of the vestimentary display and the elements that make up the key focus of the apparel. The empirical evidence is drawn from both Merovingian and Carolingian Frankish and Anglo-Saxon contexts and comprises both texts ...

Manuscripta, 2012

Business History Review

Covering the dynamic period of cultural change in late medieval England between 1350 and 1550, John Lee's captivating book, The Medieval Clothier, examines an industry that played a crucial role in the first industrial revolution as well as its better-known descendent. In this year of the bicentenary of John Ruskin's birth in 1819, it is especially enlightening to see the connections between what has been termed the first industrial revolution in the late medieval period and the nominal Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both of these industrial revolutions were powered by development in the production of cloth, from the natural fibers of indigenous wool in the late medieval period and from imported cotton in the modern era. As Lee notes in his introduction to this deeply researched and nuanced study, the beneficiaries of the revolution in the manufacture and export of wool in the late Middle Ages were not only the producers and manufacturers of the wool itself, but those associated players in the cloth-making process: "makers of dye, butter and oil, fuller's earth and teasels" (p. 2). In the second industrial revolution, fortunes were also made by those who produced the ropes that turned the cotton looms, the suppliers of spindles and lubricating grease. Lee's study examines not only individuals who made great fortunes from their entrepreneurial pursuits-Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall, the Springs of Lavenham, William Stumpe of Malmesbury, and John Winchcombe II of Newbury-but also the wide range of individuals who made their livings, at a great variety of economic levels, as clothiers. Lee makes an important distinction in defining "clothiers" as encompassing individuals involved in both the production and the marketing of the finished products produced from wool. It is this linked commercial activity that engendered the astonishing economic success of some members of this demographic. These fortunes enabled negotiation of class structures for these late medieval entrepreneurs, as it did for the cotton barons of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Technological innovations such as the

Medieval Dress and Textiles Society Newsletter, 2013

Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, 2019

and Matthew Reeves present thirty-six lavish textile objects, the vast majority of which have never been exhibited or published before-only two of the pieces have been exhibited previously (cat. nos. 13 and 20), while only three have been published already (cat. nos. 13, 18 and 20). The catalog accompanied an exhibition with the same title at Sam Fogg in London from June 14 until July 13, 2018. There is so much exciting, new material presented in this volume that scholars of a variety of media have an opportunity to mine for more extensive research endeavors. The authors have done in-depth technical analysis of each textileproviding detailed condition reports and describing the intricate and, at times, multiple and incredibly complex weaving approaches. The thirty-six objects are organized by region (England; France and the Netherlands; Germany; Spain; and Italy) and then listed chronologically by date (earliest to latest). The four examples from England are all textiles known as opus anglicanum (English Work)-the name given to high quality English embroidery made at the turn of the fifteenth century. Most of the catalog entries commence with a description of the work, then continue on to explain the technical aspects, and conclude with related works and comparative visual materials, many of which are different media, thereby making the textiles of these two-dimensional catalog entries expressly come to life. This is especially true for the vast majority of these pieces that originally decorated liturgical vestments-such as chasubles, dalmatics, and copes-that were intended to be worn in highly ritualized church ceremonies. In addition, supplementary images of other media provide a larger visual context Dimatrova