Medieval Clothing & Textiles 2 Robin Netherton Gale R. Owen-Crocker Medieval Clothing and Textiles Volume 2 Medieval Clothing and Textiles ISSN 1744–5787 General Editors Robin Netherton St. Louis, Missouri, USA Gale R. Owen-Crocker University of Manchester, England Editorial Board Miranda Howard Haddock Western Michigan University, USA John Hines Cardiff University, Wales Kay Lacey Swindon, England John H. Munro University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada M. A. Nordtorp-Madson University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, USA Frances Pritchard Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England Monica L. Wright Middle Tennessee State University, USA Medieval Clothing and Textiles Volume 2 edited by ROBIN NETHERTON GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER THE BOYDELL PRESS © Contributors 2006 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2006 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 1 84383 203 8 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs Printed in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire Contents Illustrations page vii Tables ix Contributors xi Preface xiii 1 Dress and Accessories in the Early Irish Tale “The Wooing Of 1 Becfhola” Niamh Whitfield 2 The Embroidered Word: Text in the Bayeux Tapestry 35 Gale R. Owen-Crocker 3 “De Fil d’Or et de Soie”: Making Textiles in Twelfth-Century 61 French Romance Monica L. Wright 4 Biffes, Tiretaines, and Aumonières: The Role of Paris in the International 73 Textile Markets of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries Sharon Farmer 5 “Clothing Themselves in Acres”: Apparel and Impoverishment in 91 Medieval and Early Modern England Margaret Rose Jaster 6 “Ye Shall Have It Cleane”: Textile Cleaning Techniques in 101 Renaissance Europe Drea Leed 7 Fleas, Fur, and Fashion: Zibellini as Luxury Accessories of the 121 Renaissance Tawny Sherrill v 8 The Matron Goes to the Masque: The Dual Identity of the English 151 Embroidered Jacket Danielle Nunn-Weinberg Recent Books of Interest 175 Index 181 vi Illustrations Early Irish Dress and Accessories Fig. 1.1 Appearance of Becfhola and Flann 4 Fig. 1.2 Dress of seventh-century Roman aristocrats 7 Fig. 1.3 Figures on the Cross of the Scriptures, Clonmacnoise, 15 Co. Offaly Fig. 1.4 Front and back of the “Tara” brooch 16 Fig. 1.5 Glass studs from the Moylough belt-shrine 17 Fig. 1.6 Hiberno-Viking silver neck-ring found at Limerick 19 Fig. 1.7 Woven wire ball attached to a gold chain from Carlisle 30 Cathedral Fig. 1.8 Hiberno-Viking silver arm-ring from Cushalogurt, Co. Mayo 32 Text in the Bayeux Tapestry Fig. 2.1 “Here they crossed the River Couesnon” 47 Fig. 2.2 “Bishop Odo, Robert, William” 48 Fig. 2.3 “Here they have given Harold the king’s crown” 52 Fig. 2.4 “… with the wind full in his sails, came to the land of Count 55 Guy” Textile Cleaning Techniques Fig. 6.1 Washing-day in the 1530s, from a German manuscript 107 Zibellini as Luxury Accessories Fig. 7.1 Venetian woman, by Cesare Vecellio 125 Fig. 7.2 Paduan woman from the Album Amicorum of a German 126 soldier Fig. 7.3 A marten’s head of gold, rubies, and pearls 130 Fig. 7.4 A Thirty-year-old Noblewoman, by Giovanni Battista Moroni 131 Fig. 7.5 Eleonora of Toledo in a cameo of Cosimo I de’ Medici and 137 his family vii The English Embroidered Jacket Fig. 8.1 Elizabeth Vernon, Countess of Southampton, unknown artist 152 Fig. 8.2 Margaret Laton, attributed to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger 154 Fig. 8.3 Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford, attributed to John de Critz 158 Fig. 8.4 Portrait of a Lady of the Hampden Family, unknown artist 166 Fig. 8.5 Mary Throckmorton, Lady Scudamore, by Marcus Gheeraerts the 169 Younger viii Tables Text in the Bayeux Tapestry Table 2.1 The Bayeux Tapestry inscription: Translation, parts of 38 speech, and symbols The Role of Paris in Textile Markets Table 4.1 Pennies/ell for linen cloth purchased by the English royal 81 household Textile Cleaning Techniques Table 6.1 Cleaning recipes from the Nuremberg Kunstbuch 103 Zibellini as Luxury Accessories Table 7.1 Zibellini in contemporary documents 141 ix Contributors ROBIN NETHERTON (Editor) is a costume historian specializing in Western European clothing in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries. Since 1982, she has given lectures and workshops on practical aspects of medieval costume and on costume as an approach to social history, art history, and literature. A journalist by training, she also works as a professional editor. GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER (Editor) is Reader in Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester and Deputy Director of the Manchester Centre for Anglo- Saxon Studies. Her most recent books are The Four Funerals in Beowulf (2000), Dress in Anglo-Saxon England: Revised and Enlarged Edition (2004), and King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry (2005). SHARON FARMER is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently at work on a book titled From Saracen Work to Oeuvre de Paris: Oriental Goods, Parisian Crafts, and the Making of Europe’s Fashion Capital (1250–1350), for which she has received 2005–2006 fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation. MARGARET ROSE JASTER is Associate Professor of Humanities and English at the Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg. She has published essays on clothing and conduct in early modern English society, the relations between the English and the Irish in early modern England, and Shakespeare in popular culture. DREA LEED is a costume historian focusing on the clothing and textile trades of the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. She has given lectures and published works on such topics as masque costume, dress in Flemish genre art, and the tailoring trade in Elizabethan England. Her current projects include transcribing Elizabeth I’s wardrobe accounts and experimenting with Renaissance dyeing techniques. DANIELLE NUNN-WEINBERG earned her master’s degree in Art History from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is working on her doctorate at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include sixteenth-century material culture, particularly the areas of clothing and textiles. xi TAWNY SHERRILL is a lecturer in costume history and the coordinator of the Costume and Textiles Collections Management Program at California State University, Long Beach. Her particular area of interest is sixteenth-century Italian women’s dress. Her current research focuses on the career of Cesare Vecellio. NIAMH WHITFIELD has a background in both archaeology and art history. She received her initial training in Dublin, including a master’s degree at University College, Dublin, and went on to complete a master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art and a doctorate at University College, London. She teaches part-time at Morley College, London. She specializes in early medieval metalwork, particularly from Ireland. MONICA L. WRIGHT is Assistant Professor of French at Middle Tennessee State University. Her research focuses on the narrative use of clothing in Old French romance, and she is especially interested in the interrelation of romance composition and textiles. She has published articles on clothing in twelfth-century romance and is currently preparing a monograph on the topic. xii Preface Since the launch of Medieval Clothing and Textiles in May 2005 at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, response to the journal has been uniformly enthusiastic, as measured by sales figures, reader feedback, and interest from potential authors. We are gratified at this warm reception, which confirms that the journal is fulfilling a distinct need in the growing field of medieval textile and clothing study. Volume 2 maintains MC&T’s emphasis on an international, interdisciplinary approach. The papers range chronologically from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries. Their geographic scope includes England, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy. They consider evidence of texts in the vernacular languages of all these countries and in Latin, as well as art and artifacts. Subjects include cloth production in the commercial, artistic, and metaphorical senses; fashionable garments and accessories as diverse as Renaissance furs, Hiberno-Viking jewelry, and Elizabethan jackets; the financial implications of extravagant dress; and the practical matter of keeping clothing clean. The editors are grateful to the members of the editorial board for their prompt and scholarly advice, and to the many other anonymous referees whose generous contributions of time and knowledge are essential to a peer-reviewed journal such as this. Their enthusiastic response to unexpected queries and their wholehearted pursuit of solutions to other people’s research problems is greatly appreciated. It has also been encouraging to find contributors to the first volume willingly giving references and advice to contributors to the second. Their interaction has demonstrated the presence of a productive network of truly dedicated scholars. The editors welcome submissions for future volumes from both experienced scholars and new writers. Potential contributors should initially send a 300-word synopsis to Gale Owen-Crocker at [email protected]. Submissions should be in English and must conform to MC&T’s guidelines for authors, available from Robin Netherton at [email protected]. All papers will be peer-reviewed and subject to editing.