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.

The varied cultural functions of dress, textiles, and clothwork are used in this collection of essays to examine long-standing assumptions about the Middle Ages. At one end of the spectrum, questions of dress call up feminist theoretical investigations into the body and subjectivity, while broadening those inquiries to include theories of masculinity and queer identity as well. At the other extreme, the production and distribution of textiles carries us into the domain of economic history and the study of material commodities, trade and cultural patterns of exchange within western Europe and between east and west. Contributors to this volume represent a broad array of disciplines currently involved in rethinking medieval culture in terms of the material world.

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.

This volume focuses largely on the British Isles, with papers on dress terms in two major works of literature, the Welsh Mabinogion and the Middle English Pearl; a study of a 13th-century royal bride's trousseau.

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.

A vital sourcebook for information on clothing and textiles in the middle ages, containing many previously unprinted documents.