Textiles, Text, Intertext: Essays in Honour of Gale R. Owen-Crocker ed. by Maren Clegg Hyer, Jill Frederick (review)

Textiles, Text, Intertext is a testament to Gale R. Owen-Crocker: to her commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship, and to her influence and generosity. The volume opens by outlining both Owen-Crocker’s academic work and life, including her efforts to promote the field of textiles scholarship as conference collaborator, coeditor of the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles, and coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles, c. 450–1450. A list of her publications is also appended to the introductory material.

The remainder of the volume is divided into three sections, focusing on the study of textiles from the perspectives of linguistics, material culture, and art history; literary and textual analysis; and interdisciplinary approaches to Anglo-Saxon culture. The volume’s structure is tight, and the influence of Owen-Crocker’s academic interests is reflected in each and every article. Even so, the wide-ranging nature of styles, scopes, and methodologies means the volume will be of interest to scholars working in all areas of Anglo-Saxon studies.

The first two essays within Part I (“Textiles”) are interested in the language of cloth and clothing. Louise M. Sylvester’s “The Language of Dress and Textiles in Wills of the Old English Period” explores these semantic fields in order to discover what wills can tell us about multilingual medieval Britain, and whether any linguistic structures related to cloth and clothing are specific to wills. Sylvester finds, convincingly, that the lexicon for describing such items of value was highly developed in Old English, and, further, that writers and scribes of wills later “relexified” English by drawing on textile terminology in Anglo-French sources. Likewise, Elizabeth Coatsworth’s “Opus What? The Textual History of Medieval Embroidery Terms and Their Relationship to the Surviving Embroideries c. 800–1400” surveys the language of textiles, this time in relation to medieval Latin phrases for embroidery stitch-types that include the term opus. She contextualizes these phrases in relation to specific techniques and to historiographical understandings of them. At the end of the article, Coatsworth tantalizingly gestures toward a discussion of whether these are learned terms and should be set apart from terms that professional embroiderers may have used. Unfortunately, we simply do not have the evidence to develop this interesting thread further at present.

The second two essays on textiles explore the Bayeux Tapestry. Michael John Lewis’s article, “Intertextuality in the Bayeux Tapestery: The Form and Function of Dress and Clothing,” discusses depictions of clothing in the light of the Tapestry designer’s narrative strategies. The nature of this analysis means that parts of the article are devoted to a fair amount of cataloguing, and yet Lewis’s conclusion that items like cloaks and brooches are included to highlight certain characters or their role in the narrative is an interesting one. In the second Tapestry article, “Birds of a Feather: Magpies in the Bayeux Tapestry?” Carol Neuman de Vegvar argues compellingly that the long-tailed, bicolor birds in the borders of the Tapestry are magpies symbolizing Harold’s pride and impending downfall. She outlines the decline of this bird’s reputation from the Roman to medieval periods, and frames the discussion in relation to bestiaries and later folklore. Although her focus is on the light that such later material can shed on the Tapestry, I would have been interested to see a reading of Exeter Book Riddle 24 here, since it is generally solved as “magpie.” Even without it, however, this article is carefully researched, thorough, and persuasive.

The final essay in this section is Christina Lee’s “Threads and Needles: The Use of Textiles for Medical Purposes.” She examines both archaeological and literary sources in order to discuss medical and pharmacological procedures, and she points out that textiles would have been highly important: not just as bandages, but also for...