Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Valkyries’ Loom
Using textiles to understand gender and economy in Norse societies In The Valkyries’ Loom, Michèle Hayeur Smith examines Viking textiles as evidence of the little-known work of women in the Norse colonies that expanded from Scandinavia across the North Atlantic in the ninth century AD. While previous researchers have overlooked textiles as insignificant artifacts, Hayeur Smith is the first to use them to understand gender and economy in Norse societies of the North Atlantic. This groundbreaking study is based on the author’s systematic comparative analysis of the vast textile collections in Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands, materials that are largely unkn...
Silver, Butter, Cloth
Silver, Butter, Cloth discusses what constituted 'money' in the Viking Age, and how 'money' was used? It is widely accepted that silver constituted the main form of currency. Silver, Butter, Cloth examines how silver functioned as payment but also explores the monetary role of non-silver currencies in the Viking economy.
Textiles and the Medieval Economy
Archaeologists and textile historians bring together 16 papers to investigate the production, trade and consumption of textiles in Scandinavia and across parts of northern and Mediterranean Europe throughout the medieval period. Archaeological evidence is used to demonstrate the existence or otherwise of international trade and to examine the physical characteristics of textiles and their distribution in order to understand who was producing, using and trading them and what they were being used for. Historical evidence, mainly textual, is employed to link textile names to places, numbers and prices and thus provide an appreciation of changing economics, patterns of distribution and the organisation of trade. Different types and qualities of cloths are discussed and the social implications of their production and import/export considered against a developing background of urbanism and increasing commercial wealth.
Draupnir's Sweat and Mardöll's Tears
Items of jewellery in Icelandic society traditionally have been analysed in typological, chronological and technological terms with descriptive approaches to discussing their presence in the archaeological record. Drawing on this research but taking a more anthropological approach, Michele Hayeur Smith looks at jewellery as social symbols and a potential indicator of gender, status and power differences, and of spiritual and religious sentiment. Taking evidence largely from burial contexts dating to between AD 870 and 1000, the results of her study suggest that jewellery was used to differentiate between the sexes, and especially to draw attention to female sexual attributes, and most likely to denote differences in gender and cultural identity. The materials used to produce jewellery, craftsmanship, technology and production are also examined in the later chapters.
Prehistoric Textiles
This pioneering work revises our notions of the origins and early development of textiles in Europe and the Near East. Using innovative linguistic techniques, along with methods from palaeobiology and other fields, it shows that spinning and pattern weaving began far earlier than has been supposed. Prehistoric Textiles made an unsurpassed leap in the social and cultural understanding of textiles in humankind's early history. Cloth making was an industry that consumed more time and effort, and was more culturally significant to prehistoric cultures, than anyone assumed before the book's publication. The textile industry is in fact older than pottery--and perhaps even older than agriculture an...
The Valkyries' Loom
In 'The Valkyries' Loom', Michle Hayeur Smith examines Viking textiles as evidence of the little-known work of women in the Norse colonies that expanded from Scandinavia across the North Atlantic in the ninth century AD. While previous researchers have overlooked textiles as insignificant artifacts, Hayeur Smith is the first to use them to understand gender and economy in Norse societies of the North Atlantic. This groundbreaking study is based on the author's systematic comparative analysis of the vast textile collections in Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands, materials that are largely unknown even to archaeologists and span 1,000 years.
Viking Clothing
Contrary to popular myth, the Vikings had a reputation for neatness and their fashions were copied far beyond the realms of Scandinavia. Those who could afford to displayed a love of fine clothes made from silks, from lightweight worsteds in subtly woven twills, and from the finest of linens. This accessible new book is the first to tackle the question of what the Vikings wore, drawing on evidence from art and archaeology, literature, and linguistics to arrive at a fresh understanding of the nature of Viking clothing, covering rich and poor, men and women across Scandinavia. It includes an overview of Viking textiles and dyeing, and an exploration of cloth production and clothing in the context of Viking society as a whole, as well as a detailed consideration of both male and female outfits and a new interpretation of the suspended dress.
The Real Valkyrie
In 2017, DNA tests revealed to the collective shock of many scholars that a Viking warrior in a high-status grave in Birka, Sweden, was actually a woman. The Real Valkyrie weaves together archaeology, history and literature to reinvent her life and times, showing that Viking women had more power and agency than historians have imagined. Nancy Marie Brown links the Birka warrior, whom she names Hervor, to Viking trading towns and to their great trade route east to Byzantium and beyond. She imagines Hervor's adventures intersecting with larger-than-life but real women, including Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, the Viking leader known as the Red Girl, and Queen Olga of Kyiv. Hervor's short, dramatic life shows that much of what we have taken as truth about women in the Viking Age is based not on data but on nineteenth-century Victorian biases. Rather than holding the household keys, Viking women in history, the sagas, poetry and myth carry weapons. In this compelling narrative, Brown brings the world of those valkyries and shield-maids to vivid life.
Woven into the Earth
One of the century's most spectacular archaeological finds occurred in 1921, a year before Howard Carter stumbled upon Tutankhamun's tomb, when Poul Norlund recovered dozens of garments from a graveyard in the Norse settlement of Herjolfsnaes, Greenland. Preserved intact for centuries by the permafrost, these mediaeval garments display remarkable similarities to western European costumes of the time. Previously, such costumes were known only from contemporary illustrations, and the Greenland finds provided the world with a close look at how ordinary Europeans dressed in the Middle Ages. Fortunately for Norlund's team, wood has always been extremely scarce in Greenland, and instead of caskets...
Tracing Textile Production from the Viking Age to the Middle Ages
This book concerns textile production at the fringes of north-western Europe - areas in western Norway and the North Atlantic in the expanding, dynamic and transformative period from the early Viking Age into the Middle Ages. Textiles constitute one of the basic needs in human life - to protect and keep the body warm but also to show social status and affiliations. Textiles had a wide spectrum of use areas and qualities, fine and coarse in various contexts, and in the Viking Age not least related to the production of sails - all essential for the development and character of the period. So, what were the tools and textiles like, who made them, who used them and who exposed them? By tracing t...
