The varied cultural functions of dress, textiles, and clothwork are used in this collection of essays to examine long-standing assumptions about the Middle Ages. At one end of the spectrum, questions of dress call up feminist theoretical investigations into the body and subjectivity, while broadening those inquiries to include theories of masculinity and queer identity as well. At the other extreme, the production and distribution of textiles carries us into the domain of economic history and the study of material commodities, trade and cultural patterns of exchange within western Europe and between east and west. Contributors to this volume represent a broad array of disciplines currently involved in rethinking medieval culture in terms of the material world.

About the Author
SAHAR AMER Associate Professor of Asian Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA ATHLEEN ASHLEY Professor of English, University of Southern Maine, USA MADELINE CAVINESS Professor of Art History, Tufts University ANDREA DENNY-BROWN Graduate student, English, Columbia University, New York, USA DYAN ELLIOTT Professor of History, University of Indiana, Bloomington, USA SARAH-GRACE HELLER Assistant Professor of Romance Languages, Ohio State University, USA RUTH KARRAS Professor of History, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, USA SARAH KAY Senior Lecturer, French, Cambridge University, UK SHARON KINOSHITA Associate Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA ROBERTA L. KRUEGER Professor of Romance Languages, Hamilton College, USA PAMELA SHEINGORN Professor of Art, Baruch College, City University of New York (CUNY), and Professor of Medieval Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA JANET SNYDER Assistant Professor of Art History, West Virginia University, USA CLAIRE SPONSLER Associate Professor of English, University of Iowa, USA

Reviews

"Medieval Fabrications investigates the material and ideological history of clothing and textiles. Choosing dress as a category of analysis yields important data and insights concerning its cultural importance. These essays investigate such topics as the symbolic functions of dress, its social meanings, and its coparticipation with the body in producing identity." - Susan Crane, Columbia University

"A fitting sequel to Jane Burns's Courtly Love Undressed, this innovative collection makes a major contribution to the opening of a new and genuinely interdisciplinary field within medieval studies. Both building on and complicating the recent scholarly focus on the body, this collection explores the multifaceted coverings that overlay medieval sartorial bodies and through which, as the authors amply demonstrate, they must be understood. Especially significant is the way this careful attention to material culture participates in the current reconfiguration of our understanding of the valences assigned to Islamic and Byzantine cultures in the medieval West. This exemplary book irrefutably demonstrates the importance of clothing to medieval studies and has made this reader aware of how much she has taken for granted in representations of the clothed medieval subject." - Pamela Sheingorn, Baruch College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Book Information
ISBN 9781403961877
Author E. Burns
Format Paperback
Page Count 279
Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
Publisher Palgrave USA