On Wed, 6 Dec 2006 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Ooo, a whole book about it! Thanks!
I don't remember where I found my copy. It's a fascinating book even if some of his theories are off-the-wall. :-) The one thing it did do was to get us to look critically at portrayals and look for themes and such.
Pixel, is there any way of knowing if the sumptuary laws meant woven-in stripes, applied stripes or pieced stripes? That painting with Mary Magdalen looked like they might be applied.
The Castilian law specifies types of cloth (which I will have to look up when I get home) but the London law just says 'rayed cloth'. [I highly recommend /Governance of the consuming passions : a history of sumptuary law/ by Alan Hunt, if you want to dig deeper.] The rayed cloth of the London law is probably woven-in stripes, stripes being what you, the weaver, do if you have leftover yarns but not enough of any one color to do anything useful with. I want to say that cloth woven of dyed wool is going to be cheaper than cloth that is woven and then dyed, but I don't have enough knowledge of the medieval textile industry to be saying that. [Here is where someone who does, steps in and corrects me. ;-)] Certainly the comments in the inventories and accounts are specific that rayed cloth is for the members of the household fairly far down on the social scale--the valets and such.
What we've found, in going over some amazingly huge number of illuminations, frescos, panel paintings, book illustrations, etc., is that when someone is portrayed in stripes and/or parti-colour, that person is somehow a social inferior to at least one of the other people in the artwork. So we see stripes (and sometimes plaids) on musicians and on the people that my consort refers to as "minions"--the various servants, lackeys, etc. that tend to hang around important people in the art.
Except in the Manesse Codex, where I suspect that stripes indicate someone who is a fop or otherwise on the edge of fashion. Note that that's only a hypothesis--it hasn't made it to theory yet. ;-)
Thanks to everyone who responded! I love this kind of conversation with you guys! Tea Rose
Anything to geek about stuff that isn't work! Pixel _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
