Medieval Dress and Fashion (review)

Directed primarily to a general but educated audience, Margaret Scott’s book is an excellent and lavishly illustrated survey of dress and fashion from 900 to 1570. It is also an informative introduction to the subject for scholars as well as for a wide audience.

Scott’s descriptions and interpretations of the rich visual material at her disposal are informative and often entertaining. She deftly leads the reader on a trip through six-and-a-half centuries of dress and fashion history by means of the images and words of the manuscripts she has chosen principally, but not exclusively, from holdings of the British Library, the publisher of the book. She invites the reader into this world through her acute and detailed visual observations, thus opening our eyes to the value of this aspect of our understanding and documentation of the past.

Early in the book, Scott points out the intimate connection between dress and cultural beliefs. In the San Callisto Bible Charles the Bald (King of the Western Franks 840–77 and Emperor 875–77) and his bodyguards are shown dressed in Frankish-style clothing as a sign that they were the Chosen People, but after his coronation in Rome, as related by the chronicler of the Annales Fuldenses, Charles repudiated the Frankish connection in favor of the Greek (Byzantine) and dressed accordingly to express this. But there seems to be no visual record of this change. One looks in vain for some explanation or suggested interpretation of this point.

To illustrate a major theme concerning the relationship between habits of dress and the contemporary political situation, Scott singles out especially cogent examples. She captures the reader’s attention apropos of this point when she discusses two of the forty-some miniatures in the Coronation Book of Charles V of France (1365), devoting more than three pages to the subject. Her spirited and detailed description of the clothing that the king and queen wore on this occasion, down to (and even including) the king’s special stockings (azure on fleur-de-lys in gold), not only alert us to the complexity of meaning embedded in the details of dress, but make us aware that knowledge of dress and fashion are indeed as crucial as knowledge of contemporary sculpture, architecture, or painting in reconstructing past history.

Scott’s focus on visual documentation of her subject is supplemented by her reference to contemporary written sources: account books, inventories, letters, diaries, and biographies. The discrepancies often found among them are revealing in what they can tell us about traditional beliefs and political agendas. They bring up issues in society that might profitably be expanded and investigated by further studies.

One of Scott’s excursions compares and explicates the vast differences between the visual image of Alfonso V of Aragon (ruler of Naples from 1442), as depicted in his prayer book (Prayer Book of Alfonso V of Aragon, ca. 1442), and the picture presented by Vespasiano da Bisticci and Antonio Beccadelli el Panormita in their respective biographies. The rather elaborate and colorful clothing Alfonso wears in the Prayer Book miniatures bears no relation to the impression created by Vespasiano, who says that Alfonso dressed in black, nor to that of Panormita, who describes him “as dressed moderately . . . no differently from his courtiers . . . that he wanted to be seen as king because of his virtues and his authority, rather than because of royal trappings” (141). A quote from these biographers would have been apposite here. Contemporary reports that Scott refers to, but does not quote, confirm and even further spell out what we see in the Prayer Book illuminations: in 1447 Alfonso paid 745 ducats for a piece of gold brocade, more than forty-two times what an Apulian laborer would earn in a year!

Because of the dearth of visual evidence as well as supporting documentation, Scott’s study is confined to the societal elite. As she points out, only in the fifteenth century, with the increasing...