During the medieval period, people invested heavily in looking good. The finest fashions demanded careful chemistry and compounds imported from great distances and at considerable risk to merchants; the Church became a major consumer of both the richest and humblest varieties of cloth, shoes, and adornment; and vernacular poets began to embroider their stories with hundreds of verses describing a plethora of dress styles, fabrics, and shopping experiences.

Drawing on a wealth of pictorial, textual and object sources, the volume examines how dress cultures developed - often to a degree of dazzling sophistication - between the years 800 to 1450.

Beautifully illustrated with 90 images, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age presents an overview of the period with essays on textiles, production and distribution, the body, belief, gender and sexuality, status, ethnicity, visual representations, and literary representations.

Sarah-Grace Heller is Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, USA, specialising in French and Occitan medieval literature.

List of Illustrations
Introduction
Sarah-Grace Heller (Ohio State University, USA)
Chapter 1 - Textiles
Elizabeth Coatsworth (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (University of Manchester, UK)
Chapter 2 - Production and Distribution
Eva Andersson Strand (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and Sarah-Grace Heller (Ohio State University, USA)
Chapter 3 - The Body
Guillemette Bolens (University of Geneva, Switzerland) and Sarah Brazil (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
Chapter 4 - Belief
Andrea Denny-Brown (University of California, Riverside, USA)
Chapter 5 - Gender and Sexuality
E. Jane Burns (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA)
Chapter 6 - Status
Laurel Ann Wilson (Fordham University, USA)
Chapter 7 - Ethnicity
Michèle Hayeur Smith (Brown University, USA)
Chapter 8 - Visual Representations
Désirée Koslin (Fashion Institute of Technology, USA)
Chapter 9 - Literary Representations
Monica L. Wright (University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index