The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines.
This sixth volume of Medieval Clothing and Textiles ranges widely, as ever, across England and Europe. It presents two groundbreaking articles in novel areas of textile and dress scholarship: an introduction to a previouslyunexamined class of embroidery (decorative manuscript repair), and an English-language overview of scholarly research on historical dress in Latvia. Among the other topics considered in the volume are two very different listingsof clothing items from medieval Germany: an invented lexicon by the mystic Hildegard of Bingen, and an accounting of specific real garments worn by ordinary people and donated to finance the building of Strasbourg Cathedral. Papers also consider the mercantile world of clothing in medieval London: one gathers insight on dealers of secondhand clothing from the evidence of historical documents, while the other examines the social rise of the mercers in the light of their representation in literature, and their connections to the literary world. Further articles consider luxurious dress accessories with both worldly and spiritual significance, and analyse a French manual for Englishhousewives, illuminating the often-overlooked topic of home linen production.
Contributors: Hilary Davidson, Ieva Pigozne, Valerie L. Garver, Christine Sciacca, Sarah L. Higley, William Sayers, Roger A. Ladd, Kate KelseyStaples, Charlotte A. Stanford