Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings (The New Middle Ages)

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. MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict MuPDF error: syntax error: invalid key in dict Cover 1 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedicated 6 Acknowledgments 7 Contents 8 Introduction Why Textiles Make a Difference 10 One Text and Textile: Lydgate's Tapestry Poems 28 Two Tristan Slippers: An Image of Adulteryon a Symbol of Marriage? 44 Three Dressing and Undressing the Clergy: Rites of Ordination and Degradation 63 Four Uncovering Griselda: Christine de Pizan, "une seule chemise," and the Clerical Tradition: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Philippe de Mézierès and the Menagier de Paris 78 Five "This Skill in a Woman is By No Means to Be Despised" : Weaving and the Gender Division of Labor in the Middle Ages 96 Six Tucks and Darts: Adjusting Patterns to Fit Figures for Stained Glass Windows around 1200 112 Seven Limiting Yardage and Changes of Clothes: Sumptuary Legislation in Thirteenth-Century France, Languedoc and Italy 127 Eight Material and Symbolic Gift-Giving: Clothes in English and French Wills 143 Nine Cloth from the Promised Land: Appropriated Islamic Tiraz in Twelfth-Century French Sculpture 153 Ten Almería Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary: Toward a "Material" History of the Medieval Mediterranean 171 Eleven How Philosophy Matters: Death, Sex, Clothes, and Boethius 183 Twelve Flayed Skin as objet a: Representation and Materiality in Guillaume de Deguileville's Pèlerinage de vie humaine. 198 Notes 211 Works Cited 256 Author Biographies 277 Index 279

Medieval Fabrications investigates the material and ideological history of clothing and textiles. Choosing dress as a category of analysis yields important data and insights concerning its cultural importance. These essays investigate such topics as the symbolic functions of dress, its social meanings, and its coparticipation with the body in producing identity.—Susan Crane, Columbia University

A fitting sequel to Jane Burns's Courtly Love Undressed, this innovative collection makes a major contribution to the opening of a new and genuinely interdisciplinary field within medieval studies. Both building on and complicating the recent scholarly focus on the body, this collection explores the multifaceted coverings that overlay medieval sartorial bodies and through which, as the authors amply demonstrate, they must be understood. Especially significant is the way this careful attention to material culture participates in the current reconfiguration of our understanding of the valences assigned to Islamic and Byzantine cultures in the medieval West. This exemplary book irrefutably demonstrates the importance of clothing to medieval studies and has made this reader aware of how much she has taken for granted in representations of the clothed medieval subject.—Pamela Sheingorn, Baruch College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

The varied cultural functions of dress, textiles and clothwork provide an especially cogent lens through which to re-examine our assumptions about the Middle Ages because of the topic's conceptual breadth. Its implications range from the highly theoretical to the very concrete. 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 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. In 1910, Eleanor Hammond remarked that the relationship in medieval culture between poetry and the decorative arts-and especially between tapestry and poetry-awaited a full historical examination.