This volume contains six essays arranged chronologically. As is often the case in volumes of Medieval Clothing and Textiles, a range of sources are discussed: literary and documentary material; clothing and material remains; frescoes, panel paintings, and images in manuscripts. Contents extend from the twelfth century to the sixteenth and geographically from southern Europe to Scotland and Norway.

The opening essay, by Sean Manning, investigates the use of quilted and linen armour. By the year 1160, warriors in Catholic Europe often wore quilted coats over, under, or instead of iron armour. Texts from the twelfth century onwards record this practice, but archaeological and iconographic evidence is very limited before the thirteenth century. In addition, texts provide information that paintings, sculptures, and surviving garments cannot, such as cost, the equipment of low-status soldiers, and what was hidden under visible outer layers. However, references to soldiers wearing quilted coats appear in a wide variety of texts in different languages with different vocabulary. This article, which is the first in a planned series, provides the most important references to these garments across Western Europe in both their original language and in translation. Looking at texts in Latin, the Romance languages, the Germanic languages, and Old Irish suggests that the different terms for quilted coats were more or less interchangeable in this period. By the late twelfth century, soldiers’ quilted coats were part of a cultural package with items like covertures (trappers for horses), cuiries (leather defenses for the chest), and iron hats. The article also raises the question of why the earliest evidence comes from the British Isles and northern France, when the technology may have been imported from the cotton-growing regions around the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Michael Peter, in the second essay of the volume, moves from linen to silk and from literary to material sources, looking at serial production in late medieval silks. Medieval silk weaving was characterised by the different interests of producers and consumers. The buyers’ needs for exclusivity and individual self-representation were contrasted on the side of the manufacturers by the mechanisms of the market and the rules of serial production, which aimed to economise and standardise the weaving processes as much as possible. Opportunities to modify patterns and motifs to fit individual preferences were extremely limited.

This volume contains six essays arranged chronologically. Contents extend from the eleventh century to the sixteenth and geographically from England to the francophone world and Scandinavia, covering material remains, art, documentary material, and the value of reconstruction as a research technique. Topics include garments, soft furnishings, and more utilitarian textiles.

Our readers are always interested to learn of surviving medieval textiles, especially little-known ones. Catherine Besson-Lagier accordingly examines a little-known piece of clothing dated between 1160 and 1270 from Bussy-Saint-Martin, France (Chapter 2). Identified as a sleeve associated with medieval padded armor, its shape and composition were documented during its restoration in 1995. The article places this item of clothing in its historical, textual, and archaeological contexts; offers hypotheses on the general shape of the garment to which the sleeve could have been attached; and presents the results of experiments with the creation of such a garment that takes account of the technical characteristics of the original sleeve and argues for the value of reconstruction as a research methodology.

Moving from this obscure medieval textile to the best-known of them, the embroidered Bayeux Tapestry, and focusing on the more than 700 animals depicted in the Tapestry's main register and borders, Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Chapter 1) notes that whilst many of them are recognisable types, remarkable for their vitality, they are not spontaneous creations from life. Rather, they are very dependent on earlier textile art and recent manuscript models and, in addition, were constructed with templates. The author suggests that many of the animals are not merely authentic accessories of medieval life (in the main register) or decoration (in the borders) but that they provide subtle clues to human emotions and motivations in the power struggle which the Tapestry depicts.

Continuing the focus on embroidery, Amica Sundström and Maria Neijman investigate a group of medieval Scandinavian textiles which they call gilt-leather coverlets, after the narrow gilded strip of leather used to decorate these embroideries (Chapter 5). The preserved objects have been used in churches, but written sources show that they were present in secular environments as well. The combination of materials, techniques, and design makes these embroideries unique to medieval Sweden and Finland. The authors describe the preserved objects and show how reconstructions of them can create a deeper understanding of their construction and expression.