Abstract
The essays in this collection reveal the richness and importance of using dress, textiles, and cloth production as categories of analysis in medieval studies. Textiles and the representation of them in literary, historical, art historical, legal, and religious documents provide a particularly apt tool for medievalists of various disciplines because textiles stand at the nexus of the personal and the cultural, often linking specific, individual expressions to institutionalized and hierarchical social structures. The spectrum of possibilities raised by the study of medieval cloth and clothing in all their represented forms ranges widely from the use and circulation of garments as a mark of visible wealth, social position, or class status to the varied attempts by clerical and legal authorities to regulate gender and rank by controlling dress and ornamentation. The spectrum extends further into the production, distribution, care, use, and decoration of textiles themselves, often as forms of gendered labor. It also encompasses the cross-cultural and economic effects of trade and exchange of fabrics through pilgrimage and crusade that brought Islamic and Byzantine traditions into the wardrobes of western Europe.
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Notes
Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, eds. Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explorations, and Analysis (London: Routledge, 2000);
Fred Davis, Fashion, Culture, and Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferriss, eds., On Fashion (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994);
Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987);
Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, eds., Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 1988). I understand “social bodies” as Elizabeth Grosz uses the term to refer to the body as “the political, social and cultural object par excellence, not a product of a raw, passive nature that is civilized, overlaid, polished by culture.” Rather the social body is “a cultural interweaving and production of nature,” Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 18.
See Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (Cambridge, England: Basil Blackwell, 1994), pp. 191–92.
Valerie Steele, “A Museum of Fashion Is More than a Clothes Bag,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body, and Culture 2.4 (1988);
Elizabeth Wilson, “These New Components of the Spectacle: Fashion and Postmodernsim,” in Postmodernism and Society, ed. Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 209–36;
and her “Fashion and the Postmodern Body,” in Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader, ed. Juliet Ash and Elizabeth Wilson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 3–16;
Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion: Cultural Studies in Fashion (London: Routledge, 1994).
Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity in the Movies (London: Routledge, 1997);
Sarah Berry, Screen Style: Fashion and Femininity in 1930s Hollywood (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
Jackie Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994).
Wendy Chapkis and Cynthia Enloe, Of Common Cloth: Women in the Global Textile Industry (Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Transnational Institute, 1983).
Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899) and
Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” 1904, repr. in the American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957): 541–58.
Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” 1904, repr. in the American Journal of Sociology 62 (1957): 541–58.
Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, La Robe: Essai psychanalytique sur le vêtement (Paris: Seuil, 1983).
Iris Marion Young, “Women Recovering Our Clothes,” in Throwing Like a Girl: Essays in Philosophical and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 177–88.
see Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Donald Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983);
Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Objects,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 16–17;
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977);
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962) and his The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
Hildi Hendrickson, ed. Clothing and Difference: Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 2.
Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 15.
On the reading of medieval texts as cultural objects see Claire Sponsler, “Medieval Ethnography: Fieldwork in the Medieval Past” Assays 7 (1992): 1–30.
Nancy K. Miller, “The Text’s Heroine: The Feminist Critic and Her Fictions,” Diacritics (summer, 1982): 53;
Naomi Schor, “Dreaming Dissymmetry: Barthes, Foucault, and Sexual Difference,” in Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (New York: Routledge, 1987), p. 110;
Luce Irigaray Sexes et parentés (Paris: Edition de Minuit, 1987), p. 126, my translation (“Mais l’un [le féminin] est réduit à une marque, un masque inapproprié, un vêtement imputé”).
N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting, eds., Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of Professor E. M. Carus-Wilson (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983), pp. 13–70, 184–204;
A. R. Bridbury, Medieval English Clothmaking: An Economic Survey (London: Heinemann Educational, 1982);
Guy De Poerck, La Draperie médiévale en Flandres et en Artois: Technique et terminologie, 3 vols. (Bruges: De Tempel, 1951).
Guy De Poerck, La Draperie médiévale en Flandres et en Artois: Technique et terminologie, 3 vols. (Bruges: De Tempel, 1951). On linen, Jane Schneider, “Rumpelstiltskin’s Bargain: Folklore and the Merchant Capitalist Intensification of Linen Manufacture in Early Modern Europe,” in Cloth and Human Experience, ed. Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), pp. 177–213;
and John Horner, The Linen Trade of Europe During the Spinning Wheel Period (Belfast: M’Caw, Stevenson, and Orr, 1920).
On cotton, Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages 1100–1600 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
Franco Borlandi, “Futainiers et Futaines en Italie au Moyen Age,” in Eventail de l’histoire vivante: hommage à Lucien Febvre vol. 2 (Paris: A. Colin, 1953), pp. 133–40.
On silk, Florence Lewis May Silk Textiles of Spain (Eighth- Fifleenth Centuries) (New York: Hispanic Society of America, 1957);
Robert Lopez, “The Silk Industry in the Byzantine Empire,” in Byzantium and the World Around It: Economic and Institutional Relations (London: Variorium, 1978), pp. 594–662;
Anna Muthesius, “The Byzantine Silk Industry: Lopez and Beyond,” Journal of Medieval History 19 (1993): 1–67;
and Byzantine Silk Weaving: A.D. 400-A.D. 1200 (Vienna: Verlag Faesbinder, 1997);
David Jacoby, “Silk in Western Byzantium Before the Fourth Crusade,” in Trade, Commodities and Shipping in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. David Jacoby (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1997), pp. 452–500.
On Cloth production more generally, Dominique Cardon, La Draperie au Moyen Age: essor d’une grande industrie européene (Paris: CNRS, 1999);
Irena Turnau, “The Organization of the European Textile Industry from the Thirteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of European Economic History 17 (1988): 583–602;
Walter Endrei, L’Evolution des techniques du filage et du tissage du moyen âge à la révolution industrielle, trans. Joseph Takacs (The Hague: Mouton, 1968).
On dyeing, Dominique Cardon and Gaëtan du Châtenet, Guides des teintures naturelles (Neufchâtel-Paris: Delachaux et Nestlié, 1990).
Janet Snyder, “The Regal Significance of the Dalmatic: The Robes of le sacre as Represented in Sculpture of Northern Mid-Twelfth-Century France,” in Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, ed. Stewart Gordon (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 291–304.
Elizabeth Chapin, Les Villes des foires de Champagne: Des origines au début du XIVe siècle (Paris: Champion, 1937);
Robert-Henri Bautier, Sur l’histoire économique de la France médiévale (Brookfield, VT: Variorium, 1991);
Henri Dubois, “Le commerce et les foires au temps de Philippe Auguste,” in La France de Philippe Auguste: Le Temps des mutations, ed. Robert-Henri Bautier (Paris: CNRS, 1982), pp. 689–709;
Kathryn L. Reyerson, “Medieval Silks in Montpellier: The Silk Market ca. 1250-ca. 1350,” Journal of European Economic History 11.1 (1982): 117–140;
and her “Le Rôle de Montpellier dans le commerce des draps de laine avant 1350,” Annales du Midi 94 (1982): 17–40;
Maurice Lombard, Les Textiles dans le monde musulman, Telle siècles. Etudes d’économie médiévale, vol. 3 (Paris: Mouton, 1978).
Jules Quicherat describes French clothing from its earliest appearance to the Revolution, L’Histoire du costume en France depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1877);
Morel, 1872–73), and Enlart catalogues medieval dress among other decorative arts, Camille Enlart, “Le Costume,” Manuel d’archéologie française, vol. 3 (Paris: Picard, 1916).
Germain Demay catalogues clothing that appears on seals in Le Costume au moyen âge d’après les sceaux (Paris: Librairie de D. Dumoulin, 1880);
Adrien Harmand provides a detailed account of men’s garments in the late Middle Ages in Jeanne d’Arc, ses costumes, son armure: Essai de reconstitution (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1929);
Herbert Norris charts the development of medieval costume principally in England, Medieval Costume and Fashion (1927 repr. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1999).
For art historical studies see Joan Evans, Dress in Mediaeval France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952);
Stella Mary Newton, Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince (Suffolk, England: Boydell Press, 1981);
Margaret Scott, History of Dress Series: Late Gothic Europe 1400–1500 (London: Mills and Boon, 1980) and A Visual History of Costume (London: Batsford, 1986);
Mary Houston, Medieval Costume in England and France, 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1950).
and Jacques LeGoff, La Civilisation de l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Arthaud, 1977).
Françoise Piponnier combines archaeological, historical, and anthropological approaches, Costume et vie sociale: La Cour d’Anjou au XIV–XV siècles (The Hague: Mouton, 1970).
Elizabeth Crowfoot, Frances Pritchard, and Kay Staniland record medieval finds from excavations in London in Textiles and Clothing (London: HMSO, 1992).
See Roberta L. Krueger, “Nouvelles choses: Social Instability and the Problem of Fashion in the Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, the Ménagier de Paris, and Christine de Pisan’s Livre des Trois Vertus,” in Medieval Conduct, ed. Kathleen Ashley and Robert A. Clark (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 49–85;
Danielle Régnier-Bohler, “Un Traité pour les filles d’Eve: l’écriture et le temps dans le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’enseignement de ses filles,” in Education, apprentissages, initiation au Moyen Age (Montpellier: Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la société et l’imaginaire au Moyen Age, 1993), pp. 449–67. On sumptuary law see Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996);
On sumptuary law see Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996);
Diane Owen Hughes, “Regulating Women’s Fashion,” in A History of Women in the West, vol. 2, Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 136–58 and her “Sumptuary Law and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy,” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 69–100;
Claire Sponsler, “Fashioned Subjectivity and the Regulation of Difference” in her Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 1–23, and the chapter by Sarah-Grace Heller in this volume.
On the complexities of dressing and crossdressing see James A. Schultz, “Bodies That Don’t Matter: Heterosexuality Before Heterosexuality in Gottfried’s Tristan,” in Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 91–110;
eval French Narrative,” in Gender Transgressions: Crossing the Normative Barrier in Old French Literature, ed. Karen J. Taylor (New York: Garland, 1988), pp. 45–59;
Susan Crane, “Clothing and Gender Definition: Joan of Arc,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26.2 (1996): 297–320;
Susan Schibanoff, “True Lies: Transvestism and Idolatry in the Trial of Joan of Arc,” in Fresh Verdicts on Joan of Arc, ed. Bonnie Wheeler and Charles T. Wood (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 31–60;
Valerie Hotchkiss, Clothes Make the Man: Female Cross-dressing in Medieval Europe (New York: Garland, 1996);
Roberta L. Krueger, “Women Readers and the Politics of Gender in the Roman de Silence,” in her Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 118–24;
Peggy McCracken, “The Boy Who Was a Girl: Reading Gender in the Roman de Silence,” Romanic Review 85.4 (1994): 517–46;
Simon Gaunt, “The Significance of Silence,” Paragraph 13.2 (1990): 202–16;
Lorraine Koschanske Stock, “Arms and the (Wo)man in Medieval Romance: The Gendered Arming of Female Warriors in the Roman d’Enéas and Heldris’s Roman de Silence,” Arthuriana 5.4 (1995): 56–83;
Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 213–19;
Claire Sponsler, “Outlaw Masculinities: Drag, Blackkface, and Late Medieval Laboring-Class Festivities,” and Ad Putter, “Transvestite Knights in Medieval Life and Literature,” both in Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 2000), pp. 321–47 and 279–302 respectively;
David Townsend, “Sex and the Single Amazon in Twelfth-Century Latin Epic,” in The Tongue of the Fathers: Gender and Ideology in Twelfth-Century Latin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 136–55;
E.Jane Burns “Denaturalizing Sex: Women and Men on a Gendered Sartorial Continuum,” in Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 119–78.
On literary representations of embroidery see Nancy A. Jones, “The Uses of Embroidery in the Romances of Jean Renart: History, Gender, Textuality” in Jean Renart and the Art of Romance: Essays on Guillaume de Dole, ed. Nancy Vine Durling (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), pp. 13–44;
on the linings of garments, Caroline Jewers, “Fabric and Fabrication: Lyric and Narrative in Jean Renart’s Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 71.4 (1996): 906–24;
on underwear, E. Jane Burns, “Ladies Don’t Wear Braies: Underwear and Outerwear in the French Prose Lancelot,” in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Text and Transformations, ed. William W Kibler (Austin: University of Texas, Press, 1994), pp. 152–74;
on eroticism, Kathy Krause, “The Material Erotic: The Clothed and Unclothed Female Body in the Roman de la violette,” in Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Curtis Perry (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2001), pp. 17–40;
Sarah-Grace Heller, “Fashioning a Woman: The Vernacular Pygmalion in the Roman de la Rose,” Medievalia et Humanistica, New Series number 27 (Totowa, NJ: Roman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 1–25.
François Rigolot, “Valeur figurative du vêtement dans le Tristan de Béroul,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 10.3–4 (1967): 447–53,
and Eunice Rathbone Goddard, Women’s Costume in French Texts of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1927).
See, for example, historians such as Dyan Elliott, “Dress as Mediator Between Inner and Outer Self: The Pious Matron of the High and Later Middle Ages,” Medieval Studies 53 (1991): 279–308;
and Bonnie Eflros, “The Symbolic Significance of Clothing for the Dead,” in her Caring for Body and Soul: Burial and the Afterlife in the Merovingian World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 13–39;
and literary critics such as “Sara Sturm Maddox and Donald Maddox,” Description in Medieval Narrative: Vestimentary Coherence in Chrétien’s Erec et Enide,” Medeoevo Romanzo 9 (1984): 51–64. On heraldry see Michel Pastoureau, Figures et couleurs: Etudes sur la symbolique et la sensibilité médiévales (Paris: Léopard d’Or, 1986),
and his Traité héraldique, 3rd ed. (Paris: Picard, 1997).
See especially Bumke’s chapter on “Material Culture” in his Courtly Culture, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 128–52;
Herbert L. Kessler, Spiritual Seeing: Picturing God’s Invisibility in Medieval Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 187.
On the fall into clothes see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 41–43.
See, for example, Lancelot in Chrétien de Troyes, Le Chevalier de la charrete, ed. Mario Roques (Paris: Champion, 1970), vv. 1213–42;
Lanval’s ladylove in Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner (Paris: Champion, 1973), vv. 99–100;
and further, Cesarius of Heisterbach’s story of a repentant mother dressed “only in her shift,” Devils, Women, and Jews: Refections on the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories, ed. Joan Young Gregg (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 135. For a fuller discussion see E.Jane Burns, “Ladies Don’t Wear Braies,” in The Lancelot-Grail Cycle: Texts and Transformations, ed. William W. Kibler, pp. 152–74.
See Jannic Durand, Marie-Pierre Lafitte, Dorota Giovanonni, Le Trésor de la Sainte-Chapelle (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001), pp. 231–32.
A. Lecocq, “Recherches sur les enseignes de pèlerinages et les chemisettes de Notre- Dame,” Mémoires de la société archéologique d’Eure-et-Loire 6 (1876): 194–224;
Emile Mâle, Notre-Dame de Chartres (Paris: Flammarion, 1963), pp. 9–10;
Arthur Forgeais, Collection de plombs historiés trouvés dans la Seine (Paris: Boucquin, 1863);
George Henderson, Chartres (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1968), p. 21.
and Pierre de Limoges, who endorses an unnamed woman’s plan to decorate her tombstone with an image depicting herself stark naked, Albert Lecoy de la Marche, La Chaire française au moyen âge (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1886), p. 483 along with a fuller discussion of the phenomenon in E. Jane Burns, “Medieval Sermons and the Regulation of Gender” in Courtly Love Undressed, pp. 37–41.
John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002);
Michel Pastoureau, The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
Roberta Gilchrist, “Medieval Bodies in the Material World: Gender, Stigma, and the Body,” in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1994), p. 46.
Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 171, 216.
Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), p. 121.
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Burns, E.J. (2004). Introduction: Why Textiles Make a Difference. In: Burns, E.J. (eds) Medieval Fabrications. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09675-3_1
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