The archives of the Basilica of St. Nicholas and of the Cathedral of Bari, capital city of Apulia, the southern Italian region that stretches along the coast of the Adriatic Sea (fig. 1.1), contain many public and private notarial acts, which have been partially published in the Codice Diplomatico Barese-Pugliese.¹ Among the private documents, which include sales, donations, leases, wills, inheritances, etc., are marriage contracts. These are dated by the year of the empire or of the reign of the ruling sovereign, and the month (but not always the day). They may therefore be ascribed to the Byzantine or Greek...

The cartula of morgincap (fig. 2.1) preserved in the Archive of the Metropolitan Chapter of Bari, in Apulia, Italy, edited as number 14 in the Codice Diplomatico Barese, represents one of the first pieces of evidence of the consignment of the “morning gift.”¹ Elegantly handwritten in December 1028² by a notary, the deacon Pandus, it is embellished with an illumination (fig. 2.2), probably out of respect for the high social status of the bride's family.³ This image is extremely precious, especially bearing in mind how few lay visual sources there are for the period compared to the ecclesiastical ones (represented...

Human societies have used many forms of goods as mediums of gift or exchange. Any item to which a value can be assigned, no matter what the nature of that value, might be used as such a medium. It is therefore natural that, throughout history, textile products have been used in this fashion. To the present day, the gifting of garments and accessories remains a general feature of most societies, and in places which use (or once used) barter, garments act as a medium of exchange. A number of societies have at one stage or another taken this process further...

The Latin account of the keeper of the wardrobe (vestiarius) for the Cistercian monastery at Beaulieu, Hampshire, in 1269–70 contains important English woollen textile production cost information for the later Middle Ages, and considerable detail concerning clothing for the abbey’s monks and lay brothers.¹ The following analysis of Cistercian clothing derived from this account complements Barbara Harvey’s study of Benedictine monks’ clothing at Westminster Abbey in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.² The only other late-medieval cost data on English woollen cloth production so far discovered have been the few scraps of production information at Westminster Abbey’s manor of Laleham,...

This article examines the materials used for clothing in medieval Scandinavia, based on a variety of written sources. Archaeological finds of textiles from Scandinavia have been published to some extent, and there also exist some surveys on clothing in medieval literature. However, little work has been done on the textile information found in Scandinavian documentary sources from the Middle Ages.¹ The production of textiles in Western Europe in the Middle Ages has been the topic of research for a long time, and in recent decades the study of textile consumption has also become more prominent.² Yet, Sweden and Norway, along...

The subject of the present study is dagging—ornamenting fabric edges by snipping with shears or scissors¹—as a common feature of male and female attire in the late Middle Ages. To judge by the evidence of medieval manuscript painting and the archaeological remains of dagged clothing,² this form of decoration was very popular among the upper and, later, the lower classes in the mid-fourteenth through the late fifteenth centuries, though the actual historical range of the practice is considerably wider. Dagging is depicted in twelfth-century manuscript painting and in Late Antique sculpture, for example, on a bronze statuette of...

Of all the common pieces of interior domestic decoration to be found in the households of sixteenth-century England, the stained or painted cloth wall hanging was the most ubiquitous.¹ From the cottages of poor widows to the homes of city merchants, from the halls of country farmers to the palaces of princes, these movable household furnishings could be found everywhere. In 577, William Harrison wrote in his Description of England, “The wals of our houses on the inner sides … be either hanged with tapisterie, arras worke, or painted cloths, wherin either diverse histories, or hearbes, beasts, knots, and such...