A clear and accessibly written guide to the medieval cloth-making trade in England.

"One of the most celebrated painters of the eighteenth century, Jan van Huysum (Dutch, 1682-1749) gained immense fame and fortune for his meticulously rendered bouquets of flowers and fruit. With their precise botanical depictions, brilliant colors, and technical virtuosity, Van Huysums's elegant compositions were avidly collected by the elite connoisseurs throughout Europe."-- Publisher description.

Examines the role of clothing in medieval society and discusses trends in clothing styles and the characteristic dress of different classes of people.

Describes the making and wearing of clothing in the Middle Ages.

The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines. Topics in this volume range widely throughout the European middle ages. Three contributions concern terminology for dress. Two deal with multicultural medieval Apulia: an examination of clothing terms in surviving marriage contracts from the tenth to the fourteenth century, and a close focus on an illuminated document made for a prestigious wedding. Turning to Scandinavia, there is an analysis of clothing materials from Norway and Sweden according to gender and social distribution. Further papers consider the economic uses of cloth and clothing: wool production and the dress of the Cistercian community at Beaulieu Abbey based on its 1269-1270 account book, and the use of clothing as pledge or payment in medieval Ireland. In addition, there is a consideration of the history of dagged clothing and its negative significance to moralists, and of the painted hangings that were common in homes of all classes in the sixteenth century. ROBIN NETHERTON is a professional editor and a researcher/lecturer on the interpretation of medieval European dress; GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER is Emerita Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. Contributors: Antonietta Amati, Eva I. Andersson, John Block Friedman, Susan James, John Oldland, Lucia Sinisi, Mark Zumbuhl

In this book, the author explores medieval society's fascination with the cross-dressed woman. The author examines a wide variety of religious, literary, and historical sources, which record interpretations of sartorial attempts to overcome gender hierarchy and also illustrate, mainly through the device of inversion, a remarkably sustained desire to examine and reexamine the nature of social gender identities.