The varied cultural functions of dress, textiles and clothwork provide an especially cogent lens through which to reexamine our assumptions about the Middle Ages because of the topic's
conceptual breadth. Its implications range from the highly theoretical to the very concrete. At one end of the spectrum, questions of dress call up feminist theoretical investigations into
the body and subjectivity, while broadening those inquiries to include theories of masculinity as well. At the other extreme, the production and distribution of textiles carries us into the
domain of economic history and the study of material commodities, trade and cultural patterns of exchange within western Europe and between east and west. Contributors to this volume
represent a broad array of disciplines currently involved in rethinking medieval culture in terms of the material world.
