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.

The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines. This year's volume focuses largely on the British Isles, with papers on dress terms in the Middle English Pearl; a study of a thirteenth-century royal bride's trousseau, based on unpublished documents concerning King HenryIII's Wardrobe; an investigation into the "open surcoat" referenced in the multilingual texts of late medieval England; and, based on customs accounts, a survey of cloth exports from late medieval London and the merchants who profited from them. Commercial trading of cloth is also the subject of a study of fifteenth-century brokers' books, revealing details of types, designs, and regulation of the famous silks from Lucca, Italy. Another paper focuseson art, reconsidering the incidence of frilled veils in the Low Countries and adopting an innovative means of analysis to question the chronology, geographical diversity, and social context of this style. Robin Netherton is a professional editor and a researcher/lecturer on the interpretation of medieval European dress; Gale R. Owen-Crocker is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at the University of Manchester. Contributors: Benjamin L.Wild, Isis Sturtewagen, Kimberly Jack, Mark Chambers, Eleanor Quinton, John Oldland, Christine Meek

The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines. Three of the essays in this collection focus on Italy, with contributions on footwear in Lucca based on documentary evidence of the fourteenth century; aristocratic furnishings as described in a royal letter of the fifteenth century, along with its first translation into English; and Boccaccio's treatment of disguise involving Christian/Islamic identity shifts in his Decameron. The Bayeux Tapestry is discussed as a narrative artwork that adopts various costumes for semiotic purposes. Another chapter considers surviving artefacts: a detailed study of a piece of quilted fabric armour, one of two such items surviving in Lubeck, Germany, reveals how it was made and suggests reasons for some of the unusual features. The volume also includes an investigation of the commercial vocabulary related to the medieval textile and fur industries: the terms used in Britain for measuring textile and fur are listed and discussed, especially the unique use of Anglo-French "launces" in a document of 1300. Contributors: Jane Bridgeman, Mark C. Chambers, Jessica Finley, Ana Grinberg, Christine Meek, Gale R. Owen-Crocker

Essays on the performance of drama from the middle ages, ranging from the well-known cycles of York to matter from Iran. Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic mystery cycles, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays. The articles here focus on civic theatre and display. Chester, York, Durham and Newcastle, and London. Practicalities are to the fore: what the Drawers of Dee actually did, how the actors in the York Corpus Christi Play knewwhat time it was, the difficulties presented to London pageantry by unauthorised house-extensions and horse-droppings. Even the stately entertainments of a royal tour by James VI & I featured (in Newcastle, of course) negotiationover the monopoly on coal disguised as a historical event in a play about King Alfred and Canute. Ranging further afield is an introduction to the living tradition of Iranian mystery plays, whose history and development have somethought-provoking parallels with those of medieval waggon plays in the West. Finally, the director and producer discuss their 2019 production of John Redford's Wit and Science by Edward's Boys, the first to be played by aboys' company since the sixteenth century.