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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Why Textiles Make a Difference; E.J.Burns Text and Textile: Lydgate's Tapestry Poems; C.Sponsler Tristan Slippers: An Image of Adultery or a Symbol of Marriage?; K.Starkey Dressing and Undressing the Clergy: Rites of Ordination and Degradation; D.Elliott Uncovering Griselda: Christine de Pizan, 'une seule chemise' and the Clerical Tradition' R.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; R.Mazo Karras Tucks and Darts: Adjusting Patterns for Stained Glass Windows Around 1200; , M.H.Caviness Sumptuary Legislation in Thirteenth-Century France, Languedoc and Italy: Limiting Yardage and Change of Clothes; S.Heller Material and Symbolic Gift Giving: Clothes in English and French Wills; K.Ashley Cloth From the Promised Land: Appropriated Islamic Tiraz in Twelfth-Century French Sculpture; J.Snyder Almeria Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary: Towards a 'Material' History of the Medieval Mediterranean; S.Kinoshita 'How Philosophy Matters: Sex, Death, Clothes, and Boethius', A.Denny-Brown Flayed Skin as an Object: Representation and Materiality in Guillaume de Deguileville's Pelerinage de la Vie Humaine ; S.Kay

About the Author :
E. Jane Burns is L. M. Slifkin Distinguished Term Professor in the Curriculum in Women's Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the author of Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture, Bodytalk: When Women Speak in Old French Literature, Arthurian Fictions: Rereading the Vulgate Cycle, and translator of The Quest for the Holy in Lancelot-Grail: The Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation. She co-edited the special Issue of Romance Notes on Courtly Ideology and Woman's Place in Old French Literature, and is one of the founding editors of the Medieval Feminist Forum.

Review :
"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