Medieval Dress and Fashion
Books that deal with medieval dress have to rely on illuminated manuscripts as the major primary visual source, because of the varieties of people and events portrayed therein. Often the images are taken at face value, and assumed to depict real dress at any given time; but illuminators often used dress, and elements within it, to help give nuances to the events they were painting, that contemporary viewers would have understood. The nuances could be read as moralising; or as setting events in the past, for instance.
This is the first book deliberately to focus on dress as it is depicted in the illuminated manuscript, and to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of illuminations as source material, as well as indicating how dress would have been understood by the manuscripts? original owners.
Margaret Scott was Head of the History of Dress Section at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London University, from 2001 to 2004, and is now a freelance writer. Her previous books include A Visual History of Costume: the 14th and 15th Centuries (1986) and Medieval Clothing and Costumes: Wealth and Class in Medieval Times (2003).
Table of Contents
Introduction
Dressing the Great and the Good, c.840?c.1100
The Start of Fashion, c.1100?c.1300
Fashion and Formality, c.1300?c.1400
Dressing Everybody, c.1400?c.1500
Dressing the Present and the Past, c.1500?c.1570
Bibliography
Glossary
Index 205
