The pallium was effective because it was a gift with strings attached. This band of white wool encircling the shoulders had been a papal insigne and liturgical vestment since late antiquity. It grew in prominence when the popes began to bestow it regularly on other bishops as a mark of distinction and a sign of their bond to the Roman church. Bonds of Wool analyzes how, through adroit manipulation, this gift came to function as an instrument of papal influence. It explores an abundant array of evidence from diverse genres - including chronicles and letters, saints' lives and canonical collections, polemical treatises and liturgical commentaries, and hundreds of papal privileges - stretching from the eighth century to the thirteenth and representing nearly every region of Western Europe. These sources reveal that the papal conferral of the pallium was an occasion for intervening in local churches throughout the West and a means of examining, approving, and even disciplining key bishops, who were eventually required to request the pallium from Rome.

The Wool Handbook: Morphology, Structure, Property and Applications explores the fundamental aspects of wool fibers as well as traditional and novel applications of wool in areas including polymer composites and technical textiles. Apart from textiles and garments, wool has long been used for various diversified applications due to its unique material properties. Wool is inherently fire resistant, antimicrobial, flexible and antibacterial, and as a natural material, it can be used to create environmentally sustainable products. This book explains basic and advanced topics related to wool fibers, from shearing to marketing, drawing on academic and industrial research from a range of subjects. Providing statistics, processing methods, and testing and characterization techniques for wool fiber, this book will help readers to use wool fibers to find new applications and solutions. - Provides advanced testing methods to explore the material characteristics of wool - Includes the latest industrial methods for physical and chemical processing of wool - Presents case studies on how wool fibers have been made into successful bio-based composite and textile products

“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” ⎯ this was the title of the lecture Prof. Richard Feynman delivered at California Institute of Technology on December 29, 1959 at the American Physical Society meeting. He considered the possibility to manipulate matter on an atomic scale. Indeed, the design and controllable synthesis of nanomaterials have attracted much attention because of their distinctive geometries and novel physical and chemical properties. For the last two decades nano-scaled materials in the form of nanofibers, nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanoclays, nanorods, nanodisks, nanoribbons, nanowhiskers etc. have been investigated with increased interest due to their enormous advantages, such as large surface area and active surface sites. Among all nanostructures, nanofibers have attracted tremendous interest in nanotechnology and biomedical engineering owing to the ease of controllable production processes, low pore size and superior mechanical properties for a range of applications in diverse areas such as catalysis, sensors, medicine, pharmacy, drug delivery, tissue engineering, filtration, textile, adhesive, aerospace, capacitors, transistors, battery separators, energy storage, fuel cells, information technology, photonic structures and flat panel displays, just to mention a few. Nanofibers are continuous filaments of generally less than about 1000 nm diameters. Nanofibers of a variety of cellulose and non-cellulose based materials can be produced by a variety of techniques such as phase separation, self assembly, drawing, melt fibrillation, template synthesis, electro-spinning, and solution spinning. They reduce the handling problems mostly associated with the nanoparticles. Nanoparticles can agglomerate and form clusters, whereas nanofibers form a mesh that stays intact even after regeneration. The present book is a result of contributions of experts from international scientific community working in different areas and types of nanofibers. The book thoroughly covers latest topics on different varieties of nanofibers. It provides an up-to-date insightful coverage to the synthesis, characterization, functional properties and potential device applications of nanofibers in specialized areas. We hope that this book will prove to be timely and thought provoking and will serve as a valuable reference for researchers working in different areas of nanofibers. Special thanks goes to the authors for their valuable contributions.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the wool trade through the whole of the medieval period. Within England it is concerned with the production and marketing of wool and with the ways in which the wool trade influenced the economic and political fortunes of different sectors of society. It describes and analyses in detail each of the periods of growth and decline in the export market. As well as explaining changes in the volume of trade it offers the first attempt to portray the distribution of the trade among individual merchants. As the scene widens Mr. Lloyd explains how England's relations with other European powers were influenced by mutual interest in the state of the wool trade. Another major theme is the influence which the export of wool exerted on England's economy as a whole.