Sarah-Grace Heller - Böcker

During the medieval period, people invested heavily in looking good. The finest fashions demanded careful chemistry and compounds imported from great distances and at considerable risk to merchants; the Church became a major consumer of both the richest and humblest varieties of cloth, shoes, and adornment; and vernacular poets began to embroider their stories with hundreds of verses describing a plethora of dress styles, fabrics, and shopping experiences.Drawing on a wealth of pictorial, textual and object sources, the volume examines how dress cultures developed – often to a degree of dazzling sophistication – between the years 800 to 1450.Beautifully illustrated with 100 images, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, visual representations, and literary representations.

During the medieval period, people invested heavily in looking good. The finest fashions demanded careful chemistry and compounds imported from great distances and at considerable risk to merchants; the Church became a major consumer of both the richest and humblest varieties of cloth, shoes, and adornment; and vernacular poets began to embroider their stories with hundreds of verses describing a plethora of dress styles, fabrics, and shopping experiences.Drawing on a wealth of pictorial, textual and object sources, the volume examines how dress cultures developed – often to a degree of dazzling sophistication – between the years 800 to 1450.Beautifully illustrated with 90 images, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, visual representations, and literary representations.

Twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval French texts reveal the presence of a developed fashion system long before the previously accepted birth of Western fashion in the mid-fourteenth century.How are we to distinguish between a culture organized around fashion, and one where the desire for novel adornment is latent, intermittent, or prohibited? How do fashion systems organize social hierarchies, individual psychology,creativity, and production? Medieval French culture offers a case study of "systematic fashion", demonstrating desire for novelty, rejection of the old in favor of the new, and criticism of outrageous display. Texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries describe how cleverly-cut garments or unique possessions make a character distinctive, and even offer advice on how to look attractive on a budget or gain enough spending money to shop for oneself. Suchdescriptions suggest fashion's presence, yet accepted notions date the birth of Western fashion to the mid-fourteenth-century revolution in men's clothing styles. A fashion system must have been present prior to this 'revolution'in styles to facilitate such changes, and abundant evidence for the existence of such a system is cogently set out in this study. Ultimately, fashion is a conceptual system expressed by words evaluating a style's ephemeral worth,and changes in visual details are symptomatic, rather than determinative.SARAH-GRACE HELLER is an associate professor in Medieval French at Ohio State University.