A vital sourcebook for information on clothing and textiles in the middle ages, containing many previously unprinted documents. Texts (with modern English translation) offering insights into the place of cloth and clothing in everyday life are presented here. Covering a wide range of genres, they include documents from the royal wardrobe accounts and petitions to king and Parliament, previously available only in manuscript form. The accounts detail royal expenditure on fabrics and garments, while the petitions demand the restoration of livery, for example, or protest about the needfor winter clothing for children who are wards of the king. In addition, the volume includes extracts from wills, inventories and rolls of livery, sumptuary laws, moral and satirical works condemning contemporary fashions, an OldEnglish epic, and English and French romances. The texts themselves are in Old and Middle English, Latin and Anglo-Norman French, with some of the documents switching between more than one of these languages. They are presented with introduction, glossary and detailed notes. Louise M. Sylvester is Reader in English Language at the University of Westminster; Mark Chambers is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University; Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester.

Pan-European research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines. This volume continues the series' tradition of bringing together work on clothing and textiles from across Europe. It has a strong focus on gold: subjects include sixth-century German burials containing sumptuous jewellery and bands brocaded with gold; the textual evidence for recycling such gold borders and bands in the later Anglo-Saxon period; and a semantic classification of words relating to gold in multi-lingual medieval Britain. It also rescues significant archaeological textiles from obscurity: there is a discussion of early medieval headdresses from The Netherlands, and an examination of a fifteenth-century Italian cushion, an early example of piecework. Finally, uses of dress and textiles in literature are explored in a survey of the Welsh Mabinogion and Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose. Robin Netherton is a professional editor and a researcher/lecturer on the interpretationof medieval European dress; Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. Contributors: Brigitte Haas-Gebhard, Britt Nowak-Boeck, Maren Clegg Hyer, Louise Sylvester, ChrystelBrandenburgh, Lisa Evans, Patricia Williams, Katherine Talarico.

Collection examining the Anglo-Norman language in a variety of texts and contexts, in military, legal, literary and other forms. The question of the development of Anglo-Norman (the variety of medieval French used in the British Isles), and the role it played in the life of the medieval English kingdom, is currently a major topic of scholarly debate. The essays in this volume examine it from a variety of different perspectives and contexts, though with a concentration on the theme of linguistic contact between Anglo-Norman and English, seeking to situate it more precisely in space and time than has hitherto been the case. Overall they show how Anglo-Norman retained a strong presence in the linguistic life of England until a strikingly late date, and how it constitutes a rich and highly valuable record of theFrench language in the middle ages. Contributors: Richard Ingham, Anthony Lodge, William Rothwell, David Trotter, Mark Chambers, Louise Sylvester, Anne Curry, Adrian Bell, Adam Chapman, Andy King, David Simpkin, Paul Brand, Jean-Pascal Pouzet, Laura Wright, Eric Haeberli.

Essays employing close scrutiny of texts to clarify gender issues in feminist literary criticism. One of the major problems in feminist literary criticism is the tendency to generalise when exploring language and gender. This volume clarifies the issues involved and tests generalisations by specific analysis, and in the process defines a "feminist stylistics" - a fresh, practical approach which will serve as a model for future work in this area. The seven essays in the collection analyse widely varying literary texts, using the framework of linguistic theory to address feminist issues. The texts range from Shakespeare's As You Like It to present-day pop songs, and also cover poetry and contemporary fiction. The feminist critics whose approach is under examination include Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Showalter, Woolf and a number of British feminists; and the linguistic models employed cover discourse analysis, politeness theory, lexicalisation and transitivity. Contributors: Clara Calvo, Lesley Jeffries, Marion Lomax, Sara Mills, Louise Sylvester, Anne Varty, Shan Wareing

This edited book examines the multilingual culture of medieval England, exploring its impact on the development of English and its textual manifestations from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The book offers overviews of the state of the art of research and case studies on this subject in (sub)disciplines of linguistics including historical linguistics, onomastics, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, code-switching and language contact, and also includes contributions from literary and socio-cultural studies, material culture, and palaeography. The authors focus on the variety of languages in use in medieval Britain, including English, Old Norse, Norn, Dutch, Welsh, French, and Latin, making the argument that understanding the impact of medieval multilingualism on the development of English requires multidisiplinarity and the bringing together of different frameworks in linguistics and cultural studies to achieve more nuanced answers. This book will be of interest to academics and students of historical linguistics and medieval textual culture.

A bibliography of studies of individual Middle English words and groups of words offering evidence for word meanings. Although detailed and full bibliographies exist for Old English word studies, this is the first specifically on Middle English lexicography, focussing on studies of individual Middle English words and groups of words which offer evidence for word meanings: ante- and post-datings for the Oxford English Dictionary and the Middle English Dictionary, missing entries and ghost words, possible proverbs, proposals for etymologies, wordplay, punning, new readingsin manuscripts and the reinterpretations of textual cruces. It first presents an annotated bibliography arranged alphabetically by author's name and date of publication; the annotations include notes on the contents and approach of each article, cross-references to related work, and references to reviews. Two indexes follow, the Index of Words, an alphabetical listing of words that have attracted significant discussion with references to the author(s), publication date and notes of pages on which the words are discussed; and an Index of Authors. The introductory section offers critical analyses of the word studies. Professor JANE ROBERTS and Dr LOUISE SYLVESTER teach atKing's College London.

A wide-ranging and varied collection of essays which examine surviving garments, methods of production and clothes in society. The second decade of this acclaimed and popular series begins with a volume that will be essential reading for historians and re-enactors alike. Two papers consider cloth manufacture in the early medieval period: Ingvild Øye examines the graves of prosperous Viking Age women from Western Norway which contained both textile-making tools and the remains of cloth, considering the relationship between the two. Karen Nicholson compliments this with practical experiments in spinning. This is followed by Tina Anderlini's close examination of the details of cut and construction of a thirteenth-century chemise attributed to King Louis IX of France (St Louis), out of its shrine for the firsttime since 1970. Three papers consider fashionable clothing and morality: Sarah-Grace Heller discusses sumptuary legislation from Angevin Sicily in the 1290s which sought to restrict men's dress at a time when preparation for war was more important than showy clothes; Cordelia Warr examines the dire consequences of a woman dressing extravagantly as portrayed in a fourteenth-century Italian fresco; and Emily Rozier discusses the extremes of dress attributed by moral and satirical writers to the men known as "galaunts". Two textual studies then show the importance of textiles in daily life. Susan Powell reveals the austere but magnificent purchases made on behalf of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII, in the last ten years of her life (1498-1509); Anna Riehl Bertolet discusses in detail the passage in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream where Helena passionately recalls sewinga sampler with Hermia when they were young and still bosom friends.