It is easy to dismiss representations of textile items in Anglo-Saxon manuscript art as incidental: A pair of curtains, bedclothes, or a tent might be read as nothing more than decorative embellishments. When examined more closely, however, such items may take on an important role in the structuring of a visual narrative, or their deployment may even become, in effect, commentary or discourse. Moreover, it can be demonstrated that some textile items are used strategically to compel the viewer toward interacting intellectually and/or emotionally with what is on the page.

The research of Catherine Karkov has done much to dispel...

During the Middle Ages, the broad spectrum of textile colours was described by a correspondingly wide range of names intended to beguile the customer. Some captured the nuances of delicate shades such as “dove grey” and “old rose,” while others, like “crimson,”croceus, oralessandrino, signalled the commercial value or exotic origin of the dyestuffs involved. Some terms were mainly used for wool, with others reserved for silk, reflecting the different dyestuffs used on the two fibres. The subject of textile colours is too enormous to be treated comprehensively here, and this paper will discuss a limited selection of colour...

Silk has historically been associated with wealth, power, authority, social status, diplomacy, religion, exoticism, and comfort. Silk itself seems mysterious and almost magical—a textile produced by an insect larva, capable of being dyed brilliant colors, strong enough to be used in warfare, smooth and light enough for the most diaphanous garment. In antiquity the peoples of Western Europe believed silk came from the distant land of Seres, somewhere in the East, where it grew on trees.¹ It was traded from east to west along the long, difficult trans-Eurasian overland trade routes, later romantically named the Silk Road.² Eventually some...

Most liturgical garments surviving from the Middle Ages come down to us as ensembles recovered from burials or as single garments, the latter often preserved because of their association with a venerated cleric.¹ These are often spectacularly beautiful and technically impressive, but they are hardly representative. The elite bias of preservation and recovery tends to be compounded by the interests of collectors and museums in garments made of rare silks or decorated with precious materials. What a medieval church may have owned in the way of vestments can be reconstructed with the help of inventories, but these valuable texts give...

The records of the Court of Merchants in the archives of Lucca, a commercial and manufacturing centre in Tuscany, central Italy, contain two extensive lists of clothing, textiles, and other articles that were distrained for debts in 1370 and 1380. Mentions of items distrained in such circumstances are quite common in Lucchese court records generally, but they tend to be single scattered examples. It is unusual to find many together, and the fact that the court in question was the Court of Merchants, which had oversight of wholesale trade, banking, the manufacture of silk and woollen cloth, leatherworking, and a...

The sentiment expressed in this fourteenth-century poem, “Des Cornetes,” is typical of that found in many songs and sermons of the late Middle Ages lambasting ornamental female headgear.² A favorite target for censure, headdresses resembling horns—whether simple plaits coiled at the temples or the more elaborate structures that sometimes topped them—were especially offensive in the eyes of critics.³ Moralists regularly compared them to the horns of rams, cows, and devils, and predicted hellfire for the women who wore them. Given this common religious response, it is surprising to find sculpted heads with horned headdresses adorning the vaulting shafts...

In October 1504, the tailor of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, was paid 20s. Scots to “translate” a gown of cloth of gold of tissue for the queen.¹ Translating a gown, in this case, meant altering the outside cut of the gown and giving it a new lining of taffeta.² The translated cloth-of-gold gown was likely one of a handful of rich gowns that her father Henry VII gave her before she left England in 1503 to marry James IV, King of Scots. Cloth of gold of tissue was the most expensive form of cloth of gold, incorporating gold and...

A. F. Kendrick began his review of A. G. I. Christie’sEnglish Medieval Embroidery¹ by congratulating her on her “formidable undertaking” involving “no less than visiting, examining and (where necessary) photographing every known example ofopus anglicanumin Europe. With an exemplary thoroughness and experience in stitchery few can rival, and, it seems, regardless of expense, she has laid all students of the beautiful art under a lasting debt.”² This judgment, written in the year the book came out, surely still stands. There was a major exhibition ofopus anglicanumin the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1963, with a...