Essays on costume, fabric and clothing in the Middle Ages and beyond.

This is the first global history of dress regulation and its place in broader debates around how human life and societies should be visualised and materialised. Sumptuary laws were a tool on the part of states to regulate not only manufacturing systems and moral economies via the medium of expenditure and consumption of clothing but also banquets, festivities and funerals. Leading scholars on Asian, Latin American, Ottoman and European history shed new light on how and why items of dress became key aspirational goods across society, how they were lobbied for and marketed, and whether or not sumptuary laws were implemented by cities, states and empires to restrict or channel trade and consumption. Their findings reveal the significance of sumptuary laws in medieval and early modern societies as a site of contestation between individuals and states and how dress as an expression of identity developed as a modern 'human right'.

The book examines the lived experience of worship in early medieval England and Ireland, ranging from public experience of church and stone sculptures, to monastic life, to personal contemplation of, and meditation on, manuscript illuminations and other devotional objects.

A vital sourcebook for information on clothing and textiles in the middle ages, containing many previously unprinted documents.

An examination of the fabrics, garments and cloth of the Iberian Middle Ages, bringing out in particular the international context.

An examination of the uses, meanings, and social impact of Viking Age textiles. This volume offers the first full study of archaeological fabrics and their decoration found in the North Atlantic region and dating broadly from the Viking or Norse period. With contributions from both academic scholars and practitioners, it shows how approaching early medieval textiles from archaeological, historical and literary contexts, and through the processes of learning and employing the traditional skills of making them, brings about a more nuanced understanding of early medieval cloths: their creation, use and meanings within their respective societies. The book is divided into two parts. The first, "Textiles and their Interpretation", takes the reader on a journey from how wool was processed in the Viking Age, and the conservator's role in preserving and interpreting archaeological textiles, to different types of analyses that researchers use to understand and explain textiles from across the wide area of the Viking-influenced North Atlantic region. The second, "Understanding through Replicating", investigates the results of practical experiments in the reconstruction of surviving medieval fabrics and the resulting empirical conclusions that can be made about their manufacture and wider cultural implications.

This is the first major study to comprehensively analyze the art and architecture of the archdiocese of Bari and Canosa during the Byzantine period and the upheaval of the Norman conquest. The book places Bari and Canosa in a Mediterranean context, arguing that international connections with the eastern Mediterranean were a continuous thread that shaped art and architecture throughout the Byzantine and Norman eras. Clare Vernon has examined a wide variety of media, including architecture, sculpture, metalwork, manuscripts, epigraphy and luxury portable objects, as well as patronage, to illustrate how cross-cultural encounters, the first crusade, slavery and continuities and disruptions in the relationship with Constantinople, shaped the visual culture of the archdiocese. From Byzantine to Norman Italy will appeal to students and scholars of Byzantine art, the medieval Mediterranean and the Italo-Norman world.

This volume explores the conservation and presentation of dress in museums and beyond as a complex, collaborative process. Recognizing this process as a dynamic interaction of investigation, interpretation, intervention, re-creation, and display, Refashioning and Redress: Conserving and Displaying Dress examines the ways in which these seemingly static exhibitions of “costume” or “fashion” are actively engaged in cultural production. The seventeen case studies included here reflect a broad range of practice and are presented by conservators, curators, makers, and researchers from around the world, exposing changing approaches and actions at different times and in different places. Ranging from the practical to the conceptual, these contributions demonstrate the material, social, and philosophical interactions inherent in the conservation and display of dress and draw upon diverse disciplines ranging from dress history to social history, material cultural studies to fashion studies, and conservation to museology. Case studies include fashion as spectacle in the museum, dress as political and personal memorialization, and theatrical dress, as well as dress from living indigenous cultures, dress in fragments, and dress online.

Did ordinary Italians have a 'Renaissance'? This book presents the first in-depth exploration of how artisans and small local traders experienced the material and cultural Renaissance. Drawing on a rich blend of sixteenthcentury visual and archival evidence, it examines how individuals and families at artisanal levels (such as shoemakers, barbers, bakers and innkeepers) lived and worked, managed their household economies and consumption, socialised in their homes, and engaged with the arts and the markets for luxury goods. It demonstrates that although the economic and social status of local craftsmen and traders was relatively low, their material possessions show how these men and women who rarely make it into the history books were fully engaged with contemporary culture, cultural customs and the urban way of life.

Although the luxurious spending habits of Italians in the Renaissance are well known, this is the first comprehensive study of the sumptuary laws that attempted to regulate the consumption of luxuries. Catherine Kovesi Killerby provides a chronological, geographical, and thematic survey of more than three hundred laws enacted in over forty cities throughout Italy, and sets them in their social context.