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Twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval French texts reveal the presence of a developed fashion system long before the previously accepted birth of Western fashion in the mid-fourteenth century. How are we to distinguish between a culture organized around fashion, and one where the desire for novel adornment is latent, intermittent, or prohibited? How do fashion systems organize social hierarchies, individual psychology, creativity, and production? Medieval French culture offers a case study of "systematic fashion", demonstrating desire for novelty, rejection of the old in favor of the new, and criticism of outrageous display. Texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries describe how cle...
During the medieval period, people invested heavily in looking good. The finest fashions demanded careful chemistry and compounds imported from great distances and at considerable risk to merchants; the Church became a major consumer of both the richest and humblest varieties of cloth, shoes, and adornment; and vernacular poets began to embroider their stories with hundreds of verses describing a plethora of dress styles, fabrics, and shopping experiences. Drawing on a wealth of pictorial, textual and object sources, the volume examines how dress cultures developed – often to a degree of dazzling sophistication – between the years 800 to 1450. Beautifully illustrated with 100 images, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, visual representations, and literary representations.
The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines. Topics in this volume range widely throughout the European middle ages. Three contributions concern terminology for dress. Two deal with multicultural medieval Apulia: an examination of clothing terms in surviving marriage contracts from the tenth to the fourteenth century, and a close focus on an illuminated document made for a prestigious wedding. Turning to Scandinavia, there is an analysis of clothing materials from Norway and Sweden according to gender and social distribution. Further papers consider the economic uses of cloth and clothing: wool production and the dress of the Cistercian commun...
A cultural history of dress and fashion' presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. This set of six volumes covers over 2,500 years of dress and fashion. Volume 1: Antiquity (500BCE-800AD), edited by Mary Harlow; Volume 2: The Medieval Age (800-1450), edited by Sarah-Grace Heller; Volume 3: The Renaissance (1450-1650), edited by Elizabeth Currie; Volume 4: The Age of Enlightenment (1650-1800), edited by Peter McNeil; Volume 5: The Age of Empire (1800-1920), edited by Denise Amy Baxter; Volume 6: The Modern Age (1920-2000+), edited by Alexandra Palmer. Each volume discusses the same key themes in its chapters: 1. Textiles 2. Production and Distribution 3. The Body 4. Belief 5. Gender and Sexuality 6. Status 7. Ethnicity 8. Visual Representations 9. Literary Representations. This structure means readers can either have a broad overview of a period by reading a volume or follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter in each volume. Superbly illustrated, the full six volume set combines to present the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on dress and fashion through history.
First book-length treatment of a fascinating medieval French romance, underlining its influence in the genre. Partonopeus de Blois is one of the most important works of twelfth-century French fiction; it shaped the development of romance as a genre, gave rise to adaptations in several other medieval languages and even an opera (Massanet's Esclarmonde). However, partly because of its complicated transmission history, and partly due to the fact that it has been overshadowed by the works of Chrétien de Troyes, it has been unjustly neglected. This firstfull-length study of the romance brings together literary, historical and manuscript studies to explore its making as it evolved through seven m...
Medieval French literature encompasses 450 years of literary output in Old and Middle French, mostly produced in Northern France and England. These texts, including courtly lyrics, prose and verse romances, dits amoureux and plays, proved hugely influential for other European literary traditions in the medieval period and beyond. This Companion offers a wide-ranging and stimulating guide to literature composed in medieval French from its beginnings in the ninth century until the Renaissance. The essays are grounded in detailed analysis of canonical texts and authors such as the Chanson de Roland, the Roman de la Rose, Villon's Testament, Chrétien de Troyes, Machaut, Christine de Pisan and the Tristan romances. Featuring a chronology and suggestions for further reading, this is the ideal companion for students and scholars in other fields wishing to discover the riches of the French medieval tradition.
Arguably the single most influential literary work of the European Middle Ages, the Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun has traditionally posed a number of difficulties to modern critics, who have viewed its many interruptions and philosophical discussions as signs of a lack of formal organization and a characteristically medieval predilection for encyclopedic summation. In Fortune's Faces, Daniel Heller-Roazen calls into question these assessments, offering a new and compelling interpretation of the romance as a carefully constructed and far-reaching exploration of the place of fortune, chance, and contingency in literary writing. Situating the Romance of the Rose at th...
A cultural history of dress and fashion' presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. This set of six volumes covers over 2,500 years of dress and fashion. Volume 1: Antiquity (500BCE-800AD), edited by Mary Harlow; Volume 2: The Medieval Age (800-1450), edited by Sarah-Grace Heller; Volume 3: The Renaissance (1450-1650), edited by Elizabeth Currie; Volume 4: The Age of Enlightenment (1650-1800), edited by Peter McNeil; Volume 5: The Age of Empire (1800-1920), edited by Denise Amy Baxter; Volume 6: The Modern Age (1920-2000+), edited by Alexandra Palmer. Each volume discusses the same key themes in its chapters: 1. Textiles 2. Production and Distribution 3. The Body 4. Belief 5. Gender and Sexuality 6. Status 7. Ethnicity 8. Visual Representations 9. Literary Representations. This structure means readers can either have a broad overview of a period by reading a volume or follow a theme through history by reading the relevant chapter in each volume. Superbly illustrated, the full six volume set combines to present the most authoritative and comprehensive survey available on dress and fashion through history.
Studies of varied ways in which medieval people imagined the future, reasons behind such representations, and the implications for an understanding of medieval society as a whole.
"As Rembrandt is creating his famous painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer, Aristotle is soon able to see and hear. As the masterpiece makes its way through history, Aristotle's complicated mind finds unanswerable dilemmas."--