Late medieval depictions of romance heroines, noble women, and female saints generally focus on their subjects’ beauty. Guinevere, Helen, Criseyde, the Virgin Mary, St. Margaret, and even Eve are shown as exceptionally beautiful by medieval standards, while in reaction, a number of clerical misogynistic moralists, such as William Peraldus and Berthold of Regensburg, looked on female beauty as Satan's chief device to entrap men.

Yet if such beauty, good and bad, is everywhere in the Middle Ages, theoretical discussion of its material culture, what makes it up and how it can be achieved, is less common and not particularly innovative. For the extant medieval discourses on beauty show a remarkable reliance on ancient authorities, satiric or not, such as Ovid, suggesting both the historical continuity of such writing and also how little the female desire for beauty changed from Roman antiquity through the Early Modern period.

The present paper attempts to identify specific components of ideal female beauty in the Middle Ages. I shall consider its chief utensils, the comb and the mirror; examine the processes of cosmetically “improving” the skin and lips, and decorating and covering the hair; and finally treat in some detail moralist responses to these practices, which are, incidentally, often good sources of information on beauty and fashion. In addition to classical and medieval written sources, much can also be learned on this topic from manuscript miniatures and other graphic media showing women before mirrors grooming themselves by combing their hair, applying cosmetics to the face, and the like. Moreover, Renaissance dialogues on the individual components of female beauty, such as that offered in a Decameron-like Neo-Platonic dialogue by the Italian poet Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) speaking in the guise of Celso Selvaggio with four ladies of Prato, are also excellent sources of information.

These beauty aids feature in a number of medieval and Early Modern discourses on fashion, medicine, beauty workers as a class (“artisans of the body,” to use Sandra Cavallo's term), the economics of the comb and the mirror trades, the mercantile distribution of cosmetics, the toilette as a subject for art, and the cosmetic recipe collection as a genre.

The inventory of the bridal goods of Isabella Bruce, Queen of Norway, drawn up on 25 September 1293 in Bergen, is considered an important document concerning Scottish-Norwegian relationships at the end of the thirteenth century and has been studied and cited mainly by historians. On closer examination of the text, however, a number of interesting remarks can also be made on the diverse items that made up the trousseau of the Scottish-born queen, their manufacture, quality, fabric, material, colours, and purpose. The colours and decorations of the bedding sets and soft furnishings in particular seem to be linked to significant heraldic figures.

For this article, a palaeographic and linguistic analysis was carried out on a digital copy of the document. The findings contribute to an explanation for some problematic loci, which have led to a new identification of the author/scribe of the inventory and their origins.

The text shows a number of the linguistic features that have been identified in medieval British business documents. Additionally, the analysis sheds light on a couple of technical words found in the inventory whose interpretation is not clear (banker? was perhaps used as an adjective meaning “for the seats” and palees was perhaps a noun meaning “two-coloured vertical striped cloth”). The document also contains the Medieval Latin hapax phalereteca which might mean “a metal ornament similar to a phalera” or perhaps “a sort of lock similar to a phalera.”

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

After the loss of part of their overseas empire in the 1260s, the Norwegian kings sought to re-establish ties with the Scottish crown. This was accomplished in August 1281 through the wedding of Margaret, daughter of Alexander III of Scotland, and the young king, Eirikr II of Norway. Margaret was about six years older than her husband, who was about thirteen years old at that time. The marriage lasted less than two years: Margaret died giving birth to her only daughter, Margaret of Norway, probably on 9 April 1283. The Norwegian princess became the heir apparent to the Scottish throne after Alexander III's death, but she died on her way to Orkney in late September or early October 1290. As the heir of his late daughter, Eirikr took part, albeit without success, in the Great Cause that took place between 1290 and 1292 in order to choose a new king of Scots.

The extant accounts of expenditure from the royal treasury in mid-sixteenth-century Scotland represent a gold mine of information on many topics. Purchases of finished clothing items, fabric for clothing, and dress accessories appear mingled among others, although they are usually found in sections with titles such as “The expensis debursit upoun my Lorde Governour, his Ladye, and bairnis awyn personnes” or “The expensis debursit be my lord governoris precept and spetiall commande.” The Lord Governor was James Hamilton, Earl of Arran and regent for Mary, Queen of Scots, between 1543 and 1554. This article is based on an analysis of records of clothing, fabric, and accessory purchases extracted from the accounts of royal treasury expenditure during his tenure, collated according to recipients.

Amongst the accounts lies the key to deciphering how certain types of clothing and fabric represented layers of social status and the dividing lines between them. Although the accounts provide fascinating individual wardrobe biographies, which I discuss in Dressing the Scottish Court, 1543–1553: Clothing in the Accounts of the Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, broader analysis also yields interesting results, including which groups of people commonly wore certain garments and fabrics and the importance of particular types of cloth and clothing to maintaining social status. This study provides analysis across whole categories of garments and fabric types cross-referenced with the social status of the wearers. The data set is rich enough to support many different types of analysis.

All of the clothing analyzed in the accounts must be viewed through the lens of Arran's patronage because, as regent, he authorized all expenses drawn on the royal treasury, many of which were his own personal expenditures. In addition to a large number of clothes for himself, he supplied garments to servants, familial and personal connections, political allies (or those he wished to become allies), and, in a few cases, to those needing charity. Those on Arran's payroll in these accounts included not only his personal servants but also people serving the government in various capacities. Members of this expanded household received clothing as part of their remuneration, as livery in a general sense, while only Arran's pages and a few others had “display livery”—heraldic livery that they wore to add consequence to the Regent as he went about his business running the country.

The first-floor Salone of Padua's first civic public building, the Palazzo della Ragione (fig. 4.1), the Palace of Reason, contains a medieval fresco scheme full of complex imagery: trades and skills exemplified by the medieval Paduan workforce, sky constellations, images of the zodiac signs and the planets, a rich assembly of labours associated with each month and season in the tradition of the Labours of the Months, as well as theological and liturgical themes. The scheme is located at the top of the wall where it meets the great wooden whaleback roof and forms a continuous clockwise seasonal narrative painted across three registers and across all four walls (fig. 4.2). While women are represented gathering flowers, accepting marriage proposals, playing musical instruments, or in religious roles, when it comes to trades and labour men take precedence. They harvest wheat, bake bread, and gather grapes. The apothecary, physician, barber-surgeon, and medical astrologer heal the ill when summer heat brings fevers. The skinners and tanners, boatbuilders and stonemasons, knife grinders, boat repairers, and carpenters maintain the material infrastructure of medieval life. Yet winning their place in a scheme where every image was important are seven women busily engaged in crafts which are rarely, if at all, depicted in medieval mural decorations—spinning, sewing, knitting, and making cord. This article focuses on the crafts of these women and their importance in late medieval Padua.

The Palazzo della Ragione, situated in the main square of Padua, has survived for over eight hundred years. However, the building has been altered and the fresco scheme has twice suffered damage. Hence I begin this paper by examining the genesis of the building, the painter and workshop that created the fresco scheme, and the restoration history of the images in order to gain a better understanding of their original appearance. I then focus on the fresco scheme images themselves and the crafts depicted within the frescoes, both functionally and metaphorically. I take into account the position of the craftswomen in the scheme, their clothing, and the work that they undertake.

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.

While most kinds of armour appear in the archaeological record long before they can be identified with certainty in written evidence, the reverse is true for quilted armour in Western Europe. This appears in written sources from the twelfth century onwards, whereas the oldest surviving quilted garments and depictions of soldiers in quilted garments date to the thirteenth. Moreover, written sources give detailed lists

This is the first of a planned series of three articles on linen armour. Some of the research in this paper was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Canada. of materials, information on construction techniques, prices, and other information that cannot be learned from art or the surviving artifacts. However, these texts are written in a wide variety of languages and call similar garments by a confusing variety of names. Medieval societies were multilingual, so it is necessary to study all languages spoken in a region to understand individual terms. Many terms could be used quite naturally in English, the Romance languages, and Latin. This project lays out the most important known sources from across Catholic Europe with translations, so that texts from the same country in different languages, and texts in the same language in different countries, can be studied side by side.

The sources discussed in this study are drawn from dictionaries (see Appendix 1.1 for a list), research on medieval armour, and reading by the author and fellow enthusiasts. Searchable digital corpora have been a very great help, but so have been the discussion forums and mailing lists of the 1998–2018 era where interested parties could pool their private lists of evidence. When selecting sources for inclusion, I have tried to represent as many languages and regions as possible and preferred sources with technical information to sources which simply mention a gambeson, pourpoint, or aketon. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own.

TERMS DISCUSSED

In Western Europe before the Fourth Crusade (1202–4), five families of words can refer to a quilted coat. (For words for quilted garments, see table 1.1.) Aketon, gambais/ gambeson, and pourpoint are relatively easy to interpret, although aketon can also refer to cotton fibre or to cotton cloth (see sources ii.2, ii.9, ii.10, ii.13, below); the etymology of gambeson is disputed; and pourpoint can be anything which is quilted, such as a bedcover or horse cover. Words in the jupe family are more difficult to interpret.

Whenever the conversation turns to single orders or special commissions in medieval silk weaving, sooner or later the altar hanging with a Crucifixion scene in Regensburg will be brought up as one of the most elaborate and exclusive commissions to have survived from the decorative arts of the Middle Ages (figs. 2.1 and 2.2).

The basic type of pictorial fabric is well known from medieval textile art. Starting from the thirteenth century, fabrics with subjects containing human figures are mentioned in merchants’ account books and church inventories. They can also be found among the surviving silk weavings of the period, depicting the Crucifixion of Christ along with a variety of other religious images, including various saints, the enthroned Virgin Mary, the Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Entombment, and the Resurrection. Alongside these, secular scenes from courtly literature are also attested to as pictorial themes in woven silks.

However, all these fabrics containing human figures depict small-scale scenes, scarcely more than a hand span wide. They were products of the extensive use of serial production, by means of which the centres of the Italian silk industry supplied the European market. Like the later woven orphrey bands with figurative designs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were manufactured as repeat patterns in countless repetitions, to be used as ornaments for secular or ecclesiastical clothing.

The Regensburg altar hanging is, in contrast, a unique piece with respect to its content, form, technique, and design. It originally measured about 120 centimetres (about 1⅜ yards) in height and 300 centimetres (3. yards) in width, and was commissioned by Heinrich von Rotteneck, the bishop of Regensburg from 1277 to 1296. The identity of the commissioner is made clear on the hanging, through both text and imagery. Kneeling in full pontificals, his hands raised in intercession, the bishop appears to the side of the Crucifixion scene, while a woven inscription gives his name and title. It may be assumed on this basis that Heinrich was both the commissioner and the recipient of the hanging. This type of full-figure donor portrait is unique in thirteenth-century silk weaving, representing the first occurrence in the history of European silk production.

That ephemeral and elusive phenomenon of leisure life in London, the Pleasure Garden, shone most brightly in the 18th century. It was not confined to London, and even the names of the London gardens were to be encountered in those provincial cities that adopted the fashion; but the principal London models furnish the greatest number of illustrations, Vauxhall above all. The pleasure gardens can be distinguished from private gardens or public parks since they were run as commercial enterprises which charged for admission. They constituted the principal loci for organised leisure or pleasure al fresco, and Warwick Wroth in his still definitive account of the subject (1896) listed 64, though many were small and no more than pub or spa gardens where bowls or skittles might be played. The pleasure gardens were formal in layout, in order to make optimum use of the confined space, but that does not mean that the new gardening was ignored. Far from it: several elements of the landscape garden were incorporated, particularly trompe l’oeil illusion and theatrical effects.

The purposes of the pleasure garden were to see and be seen; to mix socially; to have assignations; to eat and drink; to listen to music both played and sung; to stroll and inspect the various garden features; to dance; and to enjoy a summer evening, on the disappointingly few occasions when the weather was benign. The season usually ran from May to September, though it varied, and some of the gardens were open during the day. As time went on, further popular entertainments were added – fireworks, balls, exhibitions, juggling, tight-rope walking. Above all, pleasure gardens were about people, as the plentiful images testify, and in some ways this is the antithesis of the landscape garden, which could often be enjoyed in solitude and contemplation. The proprietors took advantage of the crowds by using prints as marketing tools: at Vauxhall, for instance, they were sold in the walks.

The pleasure gardens varied in reputation and respectability. It is still a moot question as to the social range of attendees: the entrance fee of one shilling at Vauxhall, a tenth of a labourer's average weekly wage, would deter all but the well off, but employers would bring their servants in; and those who stood to gain financially from the evening out – pickpockets and prostitutes – would find no difficulty in gaining access.

Nuneham Courtenay, some five miles south-east of Oxford, was and still is an exceptional garden because of its several facets. The two principal features are the flower garden and ‘Capability’ Brown's landscaping, but there are echoes of other gardens together with an all-important cultural context that is unique. The river Thames was a principal attraction in the landscape. The owner was the 1st Earl Harcourt, who inherited the seat at Stanton Harcourt, also in Oxfordshire, on low-lying land without much of an external view. This estate had a particular resonance because Alexander Pope had translated the fifth book of the Iliad, which earned him a fortune, in the tower in 17181 (Fig 8.1), but by 1755 the house was becoming dilapidated, and the earl decided to move to Nuneham (originally Newnham) and build what his wife, somewhat in dismay, dubbed a villa rather than a seat. Villas, as conceived by Palladio, had found ample expression at Chiswick and Marble Hill plus Pope's own villa on the Twickenham stretch of the Thames, and perhaps Pope's association with Stanton Harcourt had suggested the idea of a villa to the earl, sited this time on a significant hill above the river. There were extensive views from the house and a magical view of it from the river, as many prints and other depictions attest.

It is particularly from prints that we can chart the progress of changes and developments in the grounds and gauge the cultural approach and associations. The late Mavis Batey made a special study of the site, based on the Harcourt papers in the Bodleian Library, and I am indebted to her work. There is a clear distinction between the approach of the 1st Earl (1714–77) and his son Viscount Nuneham (1736–1809) who succeeded to the title of 2nd Earl Harcourt on his father's death. Both were forward-thinking about landscaping, but it was the 2nd Earl rather than his father who brought radical new ideas to garden design and was responsive to general movements such as the Picturesque.

There are real problems in considering Chiswick as a landscape garden. It was undoubtedly famed and regarded as a formative influence, but when proclaimed as the cradle of the new gardening there should be pause for thought. William Kent certainly introduced a few naturalistic touches, and there were numerous wiggling paths in the best artinatural tradition, but overwhelmingly, then and now, the stand-out, memorable features were and are the formal ones – the exedra, the pattern of goose-foot allées, the Pantheon-like temple in the orange-tree garden, plus the conservatory and the Italian garden (early 19th century). Lord Burlington (1694–1753) was the champion of Palladio, the Italian architect who embraced both classical and Renaissance designs of his own though based on classical forms, and inspired a whole generation of ‘English Palladians’ – but this was to do with architecture. There was therefore a dichotomy between architecture and native garden developments. Lord Burlington, up to the late 1720s, concentrated on creating a quasi-classical garden to complement his iconic villa, based on Palladio though far from being an exact copy. By 1733 there were those who thought that Kent was steering Chiswick in the direction of the new style, but, at the same time as his minor efforts at naturalising, the formal elements continued to be formal. When Burlington died in 1753, Chiswick already seemed old fashioned to some. And by and large it is the geometry that prevails in prints.

This heavily formal garden, partly classical and partly Italian Renaissance in feeling, is represented in the first half of the century by two sets of illustrations, by Pieter Rysbrack (oil paintings, c.1729) and Jacques Rigaud (pen and wash, 1733). Four of the paintings were engraved by Claude Du Bosc and published by Rysbrack in 1734: two are illustrated in Figs 6.1 and 6.2. prepared print studies of all four for Du Bosc, now lost, and that these studies reflected changes in the five years since the original paintings. Kent himself sketched numerous features in the period 1730–35, but it is not always clear whether these were proposals or records of what was already there.