Medieval textiles present a problem for twenty-first-century researchers: textual sources make it clear that textiles were ubiquitous and highly valued objects, that they played a starring role in practices of gift-giving, and that their presence must have inflected the visual experience of many European spaces in significant and powerful ways, but we have very few left to examine. Without the objects themselves, it is difficult to understand in any detail how textiles functioned within the nuanced visual economy of medieval Europe. This is true for many categories of medieval objects, and textiles – given their high importance and low survival rates – provide us with an extreme example that throws into high relief a significant obstacle faced by medieval art historians, the loss of so much medieval art. It is one thing to know that textile hangings were an elemental component of the medieval church space, a given within the immersive environment familiar to nearly everyone in medieval Europe, but it is another thing to be able to visualise that space as it would have been. We are familiar with the documentation – the inventories and lists of gifts – and with the frustrating lack of detail, clarity, and specificity in the language of those texts. The nature of this textual documentation makes it easy to skim over, to note in passing that a certain church owned some textiles, and then move on to the meatier possibilities offered by works of art that we can actually see. But that can leave us with a rather skewed picture of medieval European material culture, weighted more heavily towards those works which are more likely to survive into the modern period.

Looking to works which do not survive has its practical challenges, as so many of the essays in this volume make clear, and it raises larger methodological issues as well. In the not-so-distant past, art-historical interest in hypothetical lost models and the resulting artistic stemmata (that in some cases purport to lead all the way back to Rome) have perhaps led us too far away from the surviving objects themselves, from the concrete remains that are still able to give us a first-hand account of themselves.