Overdue Book Report: "Clothing the Past"

I know I promised this like two months ago; I'm sorry.  And honestly I have a lot more sewing I ought to be doing right this moment, but now the book is about to be overdue as well, so let's do this.

Title: Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Western Europe
Authors: Elizabeth Coatsworth & Gale R. Owen-Crocker
Publication Information: Leiden: Boston: Brill, 2018
ISBN: 978-90-04-28870-6 
(There is also an ebook version, ISBN 978-90-04-35216-2)

This 450-page tome contains full descriptions (ranging from 1-3 pages) of ~100 medieval garments.  Each item begins with a full-page color photo, and finishes with a description of Materials, Dimensions, and Further Reading [about that item specifically].  The remainder of the text gives context for each piece--e.g., the entry for the Museum of London wool garter starts by talking about garters in general, when you start seeing them, what variations of material they were made of; and the entry for the Golden Gown of Margrete goes into detail about who she was and why she mattered...and then into why it may well not be hers after all, ahem.

the "Little Sampford" hat,
mid-14th century. Wool
felt originally covered w/
silk.  I HAD NO IDEA

Some of the items in here are old friends that many of us have a lot of bookage about already (e.g., three Greenland gowns); some are ones we know but may not have had access to much detail about them; and some are completely new, at least to me. That in itself is exciting--I thought I knew the whole canon.  NOPE!   They've also chased down as much data as possible about the newer finds, like the Lengberg lingerie...and some old finds, too, for that matter.   For instance!  They got access to an article I couldn't, so now I know that Gold Charlie's flat buttons have a wooden core, not metal and not felt. 

many diagrams!

An excellent feature of this book is that all textile terms more recondite than, like, "cloth" or "thread" are marked with asterisks to show that they're covered in the extensive glossary in the back.  Said glossary defines fabric types (e.g. felt, lampas, damask), sewing terms (e.g. gore, selvedge), specific period terms (e.g. chaperon, guibbone), and stitch & weave types (e.g. stem stitch, twill weave)....and they include small diagrams of the latter.  So, it's an accessible resource for even a comparative newbie to the textile world.

The items are organized in chapters by broad category of type: footwear, headgear, outer garments, vestments, etc.  (Not all of the categories are immediately obvious to me--hose and socks are separate from footwear--but the table of contents is clear and detailed.)  There are also a number of handy tables and diagrams at the front so that if you're interested in, say, Stuff From Germany or Stuff From The 12th Century instead of Stuff That Are Socklike, you can cherry-pick the entries of immediate interest.

Does it include every single item known to science?  No.  But most of the choices they made make a lot of sense.  You don't need the whole canon of Greenland gown remnants in here, nor do you need every single ecclesiastical cope; they chose a representative few.  And I'm not sure, but it might be otherwise complete for ordinary citizen garments between 700 and 1500. (They don't include the Thorsberg trousers, for instance; sorry.)  

The kicker here, of course, is that the book retails for $225.00 of your Earth dollars.  Even by scholarly-tome standards, that is a hell of a whack.  But if you can at all budget for it, it is worth every penny.  (And if you can't, grease someone who works in higher ed. who can ILL it, like I did.)