Medieval Fabrications / The New Middle Ages (PDF)

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

"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