Medieval Fabrications Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings

by Burns, E. Jane

• ISBN13: 9781403961877
• ISBN10: 1403961875
• eBook ISBN(s): 9781137096753
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-09-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

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.

Author Biography

E. Jane Burns is L.M. Slifkin Distinguished Term Professor in the Ciuriculum in Women's Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Table of Contents

Introduction Why Textiles Make a Difference	1	(18)
E. Jane Burns
Text and Textile: Lydgate's Tapestry Poems	19	(16)
Claire Sponsler
Tristan Slippers: An Image of Adultery or a Symbol of Marriage?	35	(20)
Kathryn Starkey
Dressing and Undressing the Clergy: Rites of Ordination and Degradation	55	(16)
Dyan Elliott
Uncovering Griselda: Christine de Pizan, ``une seule chemise,'' and the Clerical Tradition: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Philippe de Mezieres and the Menagier de Paris	71	(18)
Roberta L. Krueger
``This Skill in a Woman is By No Means to Be Despised'': Weaving and the Gender Division of Labor in the Middle Ages	89	(16)
Ruth Mazo Karras
Tucks and Darts: Adjusting Patterns to Fit Figures for Stained Glass Windows Around 1200	105	(16)
Madeline H. Caviness
Limiting Yardage and Changes of Clothes: Sumptuary Legislation in Thirteenth-Century France, Languedoc, and Italy	121	(16)
Sarah-Grace Heller
Material and Symbolic Gift Giving: Clothes in English and French Wills	137	(10)
Kathleen Ashley
Cloth from the Promised Land: Appropriated Islamic Tiraz in Twelfth-Century French Sculpture	147	(18)
Janet Snyder
Almeria Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary: Toward a ``Material'' History of the Medieval Mediterranean	165	(12)
Sharon Kinoshita
How Philosophy Matters: Death, Sex, Clothes, and Boethius	177	(16)
Andrea Denny-Brown
Flayed Skin as objet a: Representation and Materiality in Guillaume de Deguileville's Pelerinage de vie humaine	193	(14)
Sarah Kay
Notes	207	(45)
Works Cited	252	(21)
Author Biographies	273	(2)
Index	275