Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images (review)

In the introduction to this volume, the editors claim that the study of dress and textiles as a field is now 'recognized as significant and is no longer "marginalized" in the academy' (p. 1). While the collection of 14 essays presented here cannot be held as representative of the field as a whole, it does present something of a snapshot of the variety of prevailing approaches, and highlights some of the strengths and weaknesses of the approaches to the study of medieval dress and textiles.

The essays are grouped chronologically in three sections, denoting the early, middle and late Middle Ages, and their subjects range from Merovingian Gaul to the publication of The Shoemaker's Holiday in 1599, covering a period of some thousand years, but limited geographically to western and southern Europe. The editors point out that the essays are contributed by 'scholars and practitioners in archaeology, art history, conservation, drama, economics, history, legal studies, literature, religion and technology' (p. 2). All of them are women, as are the vast majority of scholars in this field, although this is not a point to which the editors draw attention.

As a collection this work is indeed interdisciplinary, and there can be no doubt that the field of study requires an interdisciplinary approach. However, the collection also provides evidence that there is a tension between the impetus to interdisciplinarity and the training of scholars in particular traditional discipline areas. Many of the individual essays present discrete examples of a particular disciplinary approach to a topic; fewer attempt an interdisciplinary analysis, and only a subset of those are really successful at positioning a specific study in textile history across traditional disciplinary boundaries. In general, the best essays are those which focus on relatively narrow questions, or which deal with single or closely grouped images, texts or artefacts, allowing the author space to undertake a variety of approaches and to avoid assumptions of homogeneity across time and place.

Nina Crummy's chapter, 'From Self-Sufficiency to Commerce: Structural and Artifactual Evidence for Textile Manufacture in Eastern England in the Pre-Conquest Period' provides such a close focus. She presents an archaeological analysis of textile tools found at West Stow in Suffolk, Goltho in Lincolnshire and Coppergate in York to show communities engaged in textile production at different levels, and concludes that the commercial production of textiles was linked to specialization and urban development.

Another example of a tightly focused study is Donna M. Cottrell's chapter 'Unraveling the Mystery of Jan van Eyck's Cloths of Honor: The Ghent Altarpiece', which deals with the representation of specific textiles in a single work, and addresses not only the significance of precious woven textiles in devotional context, but also the technical aspects of their production and depiction. Cottrell demonstrates van Eyck has altered the physical nature of one cloth in his depiction 'in order to permit a fuller view of the details, and to balance the compositional elements within the textile and the panel' (p. 177), indicating her understanding that the relationship between artistic depictions and textiles as artefacts is not transparent.

Similarly, Penny Howell Jolly's chapter, 'Marked Difference: Earrings and "the Other" in Fifteenth-century Flemish Art', draws on a knowledge of artistic convention, in this case the depiction of Jews and blacks wearing earrings, in order to interpret their significance in a Christian religious context. Jolly provides a well argued case that this convention is a primarily artistic one, made to mark the exotic, and does not reflect the realities of contemporary dress for minority groups in fifteenth-century Western Europe.

Susan L'Engle makes explicit that 'illuminators manipulated elements of fashion, fit, accessories and hairstyle …' (p. 137), and the title of her chapter 'Addressing the Law: Costume as Signifier in Medieval Legal Miniatures' is indicative of an understanding that there may be a complex relationship between actual...