In this wide-ranging study of costume history contributors explore fashion, textiles, and the representation of clothing in the middle ages. Essays combine the perspectives of archaeology, art history, economics, religion, costume history, material culture, and literary criticism and explore materials from England, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, and Ireland. The collection focuses on multiple aspects of textiles and dress - their making, meaning, and representation - and explores the impact of international trade and other forms of cultural exchange.

The study of medieval clothing and textiles reveals much about the history of our material culture, as well as social, economic and cultural history as a whole. This book makes use of archaeological finds and text references in order to examine this history, providing on overview of historic fashions.

During the medieval period, people invested heavily in looking good. The finest fashions demanded careful chemistry and compounds imported from great distances and at considerable risk to merchants; the Church became a major consumer of both the richest and humblest varieties of cloth, shoes, and adornment; and vernacular poets began to embroider their stories with hundreds of verses describing a plethora of dress styles, fabrics, and shopping experiences. Drawing on a wealth of pictorial, textual and object sources, the volume examines how dress cultures developed – often to a degree of dazzling sophistication – between the years 800 to 1450. Beautifully illustrated with 100 images, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, visual representations, and literary representations.

"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 thetime. 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 reconstruction of medieval techniques or artifacts will also form a particular focus. The contents of each volume are selected to cover a broad geographical scope, as well as a range of periods from early medieval to the late Middle Ages. The journal also publishes short reviews of new books. Topics in this first volume include Anglo-Saxon embroidery; textiles and textile imagery in the Exeter Book; the tippet; the regulation of clerical dress; and evidence for dress and textiles in late medieval English wills."--

This absorbing survey of medieval clothing makes an important and unique contribution to our understanding of the cultural and social conditions of western Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Drawing on paintings and sculpture, documents and literature, surviving clothing, textiles, jewelry, and armor, Fran oise Piponnier and Perrine Mane show that garments and accessories of the middle ages reveal much about life and society of the time. The authors examine the sources for clothing: what clothes were made of, why, and from where the materials came. They provide a chronology of changes in western European dress during the period, investigating the development and spread of "fashion." They explore the differences between the clothing of men and women, explaining that changes in fashion for women were less spectacular than those for men because of the secondary position of women in medieval society. The authors also discuss the changing significance of clothing to people as they progressed through life, how clothing related to status, the varied work attire of such professionals as lawyers, academics, and members of religious orders, and the clothing of carnival and disguise. Elegantly written and attractively presented, the book will be of interest not only to students of medieval history but also to anyone fascinated by clothes and fashion.

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. The contents cover a broad geographical scope and a range of periods from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The first three volumes are now available as a specially-priced set. Topics covered include: Anglo-Saxon embroidery; textiles and textile imagery in the Exeter Book; the Latin inscription embroidered on the Bayeux Tapestry; clothmaking in twelfth-century French romances; medieval Paris as an international textile market; the use of jewelled animal pelts as fashion accessories in the Renaissance; soft furnishings; aristocratic children's clothing, and much more.

This volume is a unique work that brings together the latest research from across the range of disciplines which contribute to our knowledge of medieval dress and textiles.