The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines and with a special focus on reconstruction and re-enactment. Historical dress and textiles, always a topic of popular interest, has in recent years become an academic subject in its own right, transcending traditional genre boundaries. This annual journal includes in-depth studies from a variety of disciplines as well as cross-genre scholarship, representing such fields as social history, economics, history of techniques and technology, art history, archaeology, literature, and language. The contents cover a broad geographical scope and a range of periods from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Papers in this latest volume discuss clothing descriptions in an early Irish poem in relation to archaeological finds; the Latin inscription embroidered on the Bayeux Tapestry; clothmaking in twelfth-century French romances; medieval Paris as an international textile market; the cost of sartorial excess in England as attested by sumptuary laws and satire; textile cleaning techniques at a German convent in the fifteenth century; the use of jewelled animal pelts as fashion accessories in the Renaissance; and the social significance of the embroidered jacket in early modern England. Also included are reviews of recent books on dress and textile topics. ROBIN NETHERTON's research focuses on medieval Western European clothing and its interpretation by artists and historians; GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER is Professor ofAnglo-Saxon Culture, The University of Manchester. Her most recent books are Dress in Anglo-Saxon England (2004), and King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry (2005). Contributors: Niamh Whitfield, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Monica L. Wright, Sharon Farmer, Margaret Rose Jaster, Drea Leed, Tawny Sherrill, Danielle Nunn-Weinberg

Nothing less than a rethinking of what we mean when we talk about "men" and "women" of the medieval period, this volume demonstrates how the idea of gender -- in the Middle Ages no less than now -- intersected in subtle and complex ways with other categories of difference. Responding to the insights of postcolonial and feminist theory, the authors show that medieval identities emerged through shifting paradigms -- that fluidity, conflict, and contingency characterized not only gender, but also sexuality, social status, and religion. This view emerges through essays that delve into a wide variety of cultures and draw on a broad range of disciplinary and theoretical approaches. Scholars in the fields of history as well as literary and religious studies consider gendered hierarchies in western Christian, Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic areas of the medieval world.

For more than one hundred years, from the last decade of the thirteenth century to the late fourteenth, Paris was the only western European town north of the Mediterranean basin to produce luxury silk cloth. What was the nature of the Parisian silk industry? How did it get there? And what do the answers to these questions tell us? According to Sharon Farmer, the key to the manufacture of silk lies not just with the availability and importation of raw materials but with the importation of labor as well. Farmer demonstrates the essential role that skilled Mediterranean immigrants played in the formation of Paris's population and in its emergence as a major center of luxury production. She highlights the unique opportunities that silk production offered to women and the rise of women entrepreneurs in Paris to the very pinnacles of their profession. The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris illuminates aspects of intercultural and interreligious interactions that took place in silk workshops and in the homes and businesses of Jewish and Italian pawnbrokers. Drawing on the evidence of tax assessments, aristocratic account books, and guild statutes, Farmer explores the economic and technological contributions that Mediterranean immigrants made to Parisian society, adding new perspectives to our understanding of medieval French history, luxury trade, and gendered work.

When Sherry retires and moves to a Sun City, Arizona retirement community, she makes a special friend right in her back yard! She is excited to explore all of the nature of her desert. Right away she begins picking lemons to cook with from her desert lemon tree and soon realizes that with her big sunhat and sunglasses, she not only looks like a spy, but is becoming a spy! Her tree begins to whisper to her and they become fast spy friends! What could they possibly look at all day long? What do they hear at night? And Sherry becomes so close to her tree that she must find just the right name for her. You will discover what our desert backyards are like through adorable, comical, wildlife that live a smart but simple life, with messages for children to learn. Told in fun, fact-filled rhyme, it is a great story for a book report, for a scouting badge requirement, and for a desert citizen to send to his/her out-of-town loved ones to help them visualize that faraway backyard.

A new generation of historians today is borrowing from cultural anthropology, postmodern critical theory, and gender studies to understand the social meanings of medieval religious movements, practices, figures, and cults. In this volume Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein bring together essays -- all hitherto unpublished -- that combine some of the best of these new approaches with rigorous research and traditional scholarship.

Some of these essays re-envision the professionals of religion: the monks and nuns who carried out crucial social functions as mediators between living and dead, repositories for social memory, and loci of vicarious piety. In their religious life these people embodied an image of the society that produced them. Other contributions focus on social categories, usually expressed as dichotomies: male/female, insider/outsider, saint/outcast. Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts is the first book to show the interaction of seemingly antithetical groups of medieval people and the ways in which they were defined by, as well as against, each other. All of the essays, taken together, form a tribute to Lester K. Little, pioneer in the study of religion in medieval society.

A new generation of historians today is borrowing from cultural anthropology, postmodern critical theory, and gender studies to understand the social meanings of medieval religious movements, practices, figures, and cults. In this volume Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein bring together essays -- all hitherto unpublished -- that combine some of the best of these new approaches with rigorous research and traditional scholarship.

Some of these essays re-envision the professionals of religion: the monks and nuns who carried out crucial social functions as mediators between living and dead, repositories for social memory, and loci of vicarious piety. In their religious life these people embodied an image of the society that produced them. Other contributions focus on social categories, usually expressed as dichotomies: male/female, insider/outsider, saint/outcast. Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts is the first book to show the interaction of seemingly antithetical groups of medieval people and the ways in which they were defined by, as well as against, each other. All of the essays, taken together, form a tribute to Lester K. Little, pioneer in the study of religion in medieval society.

This book about poor men and women in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Paris reveals the other side of the "age of cathedrals" in the very place where gothic architecture and scholastic theology were born. In Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris, Sharon Farmer extends and deepens the understanding of urban poverty in the High Middle Ages. She explores the ways in which cultural elites thought about the poor, and shows that their conceptions of poor men and women derived from the roles assigned to men and women in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis--men are associated with productive labor, or labor within the public realm, and women with reproductive labor, or labor within the private realm.Farmer proceeds to complicate this picture, showing that elite society's attitude toward an individual's social role and moral capacity depended not only on gender but also on the person's social status. Such perceptions in turn influenced the kinds of care extended or denied to the poor by charitable organizations and the informal self-help networks that arose among the poor themselves. Of particular interest are Farmer's discussions of society's responses to men and women who were disabled to the point of being incapable of any work at all.

Sharon Farmer here investigates the ways in which three medieval communities—the town of Tours, the basilica of Saint-Martin there, and the abbey of Marmoutier nearby—all defined themselves through the cult of Saint Martin. She demonstrates how in the early Middle Ages the bishops of Tours used the cult of Martin, their fourthcentury predecessor, to shape an idealized image of Tours as Martin's town. As the heirs to Martin's see, the bishops projected themselves as the rightful leaders of the community. However, in the late eleventh century, she shows, the canons of Saint-Martin (where the saint's relics resided) and the monks of Marmoutier (which Martin had founded) took control of the cult and produced new legends and rituals to strengthen their corporate interests. Since the basilica and the abbey differed in their spiritualities, structures, and external ties, the canons and monks elaborated and manipulated Martin's cult in quite different ways. Farmer shows how one saint's cult lent itself to these varying uses, and analyzes the strikingly dissimilar Martins that emerged. Her skillful inquiry into the relationship between group identity and cultural expression illuminates the degree to which culture is contested territory. Farmer's rich blend of social history and hagiography will appeal to a wide range of medievalists, cultural anthropologists, religious historians, and urban historians.