Gale R. Owen-Crocker & Maren Clegg Hyer 
Refashioning Medieval and Early Modern Dress 
A Tribute to Robin Netherton

Essays on costume, fabric and clothing in the Middle Ages and beyond.


All those who work with historical dress and textiles must in some way re-fashion them. This fundamental concept is developed and addressed by the articles collected here, ranging over issues of gender, status and power. Topics include: the repurposing and transformation of material items for purposes of religion, memorialisation, restoration and display; attempts to regulate dress, both ecclesiastical and secular, the reasons for it and the refashioning which was both a result and a reaction; conventional ways in which dress was used to characterise children, and their transition into young men; how symbolism-laded dress items could indicate political/religious affiliations; waysin which allegorical, biblical and historical figures were depicted in art in dress familiar to the viewers of their own era, and the emotive and intellectual responses to these costumes the artists sought to elicit; and the use of clothing in medieval literature (often rich, exotic or unique) as narrative, structuring and rhetorical devices.

Taken together, they honour the costume historian and editor Robin Netherton, who has been hugely influentialin the development of medieval and Renaissance dress and textile studies.


GALE R. OWEN-CROCKER is Professor Emerita at the University of Manchester; MAREN CLEGG HYER is Professor of English at Valdosta State University.


Contributors: Melanie Schuessler Bond, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Lisa Evans, Gina Frasson-Hudson, Charney Goldman, Sarah-Grace Heller, Maren Clegg Hyer, John Friedman, Thomas Izbicki, Drea Leed, Christine Meek, M.A. Nordtorp-Madson, Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Lucia Sinisi, Monica L. Wright.

Tabella dei contenuti

Introduction – Maren Clegg Hyer

Robin Netherton: A Life – Gale R. Owen-Crocker

Introduction – Gale R. Owen-Crocker

Robin Netherton: A Life – Gina A. Frasson-Hudson and Charney Goldman

Precious Offerings: Dressing Devotional Statues in Medieval England – Maren Clegg Hyer

Dressing the Earth: Eleventh-century Garb in the Exultet Roll of Bari – Lucia Sinisi

Dress, Disguise, and Shape-Shifting in
Nibelungenlied and Volsunga Saga – Michelle Nordtorp-Madson

Survival, Recovery, Restoration, Re-creation: the Long Life of Medieval Garments – Elizabeth Coatsworth

Coping with Connoisseurship: Issues in Attribution and Purpose raised by an Indo-Portuguese ‘Vestment’ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art – Lisa Evans

Refashioning St. Edward: Clothing and Textiles – Gale R. Owen-Crocker

‘Dressed to Kill:’ The Clothing of Christ’s Tormentors in an Illustrated Polish Devotional Manuscript – John Block Friedman

Treason and Clothing in Sixteenth-Century England: The Case of Gregory ‘Sweetlips’ Botolf – Melanie Schuessler Bond

The Lexicon of Apparel in the Pastourelle Corpus: Refashioning Shepherdesses – Sarah-Grace Heller

The Real Unreal: Chrétien de Troyes’s Fashioning of Erec and Enide – Monica L. Wright

Regulating and Refashioning Dress: Sumptuary Legislation and its Enforcement in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century Lucca – Christine E. Meek

Nuns’ Clothing and Ornaments in English and Northern French Ecclesiastical Regulations – Thomas M. Izbicki

Clothing Dependents: Dress of Children and Servants in the Petre Household, 1586-1587 – Drea Leed

Circa l’autore

Monica L. Wright is the Granger and Debaillon Professor of French and Medieval Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA. Her research focuses on the use of clothing in medieval French literature.