Textiles, Text, Intertext: Essays in Honour of Gale R. Owen-Crocker, ed. Maren Clegg Hyer and Jill Frederick

Abstract

The essays in this Festschrift range widely, encompassing literary study, archaeology, art history, and dress and textile history from the Anglo-Saxon to the post-Conquest era. Some authors concentrate on their areas of particular expertise, reflecting Gale Owen-Crocker’s wide range of academic interests, while others approach their subject in the interdisciplinary manner which Owen-Crocker has championed over several decades. The volume is introduced by Maren Clegg Hyer, who outlines Owen-Crocker’s life and career, and by a personal reflection from Robin Netherton, with whom Owen-Crocker set up the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles. A list of Owen-Crocker’s publications demonstrates the range of her research interests. Contributions are loosely grouped under three headings: Textiles comprises offerings related to Anglo-Saxon and Norman dress and textiles; Text focuses on the textual traditions of the Anglo-Saxons; Intertext contains essays with an interdisciplinary flavour. Louise Sylvester examines the language of dress and textiles in Old English wills. She notes that the textiles and garments bequeathed were described with a highly developed lexicon and that Old English vocabulary was replaced almost completely after the Conquest. Elizabeth Coatsworth examines the textual history of medieval embroidery terms and the extent to which a few can confidently be assigned to techniques found on surviving English medieval embroideries. Michael Lewis considers the depiction of clothing in the Bayeux Tapestry, concluding that there are strong links between representations in the Tapestry and in contemporary manuscript art. The dearth of archaeological evidence makes it difficult to judge whether contemporary fashions are being shown. Carol Neuman de Vegvar examines possible representations of magpies in the Bayeux Tapestry. She traces the attributes ascribed to the birds from antiquity to the later Middle Ages and suggests why they may have been included in the Tapestry. Christina Lee considers the evidence for the use of textiles in medical and pharmacological procedures, drawing on meagre archaeological and more abundant literary sources from the fifth to the tenth centuries. Maren Clegg Hyer traces the tradition of ‘wordweaving’—imagery associated with weaving as a metaphor for literary construction—from pre-Augustan Rome to William of Malmesbury, by way of Aldhelm. It is unclear whether the high incidence of ‘wordweaving’ texts associated with women is coincidental or reflects the traditional identification of textiles with women. Jill Frederick examines four of the Exeter Book riddles that likely pertain to weaving. She suggests that gender roles in Anglo-Saxon culture might not have been as set as the archaeological evidence seems to show. In a stimulating chapter, Marilina Cesario uses Anglo-Saxon prognostics and annals alongside the work of modern astrophysicists and geophysicists to examine the entry for the year 793 in versions D, E and F of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. She concludes that the annal, as we have it now, may owe much to the anxieties engendered in England by eleventh-century Scandinavian raids and to renewed interest in the natural world following the Benedictine Reform. Donald Scragg enjoyably brings together a collection of entries in Old English in the margins and blank spaces of manuscripts, commenting on their function, possible authorship and the hands in which they are written. Such marginal notes expand our knowledge of the uniformity of language and of the number of writers in the Anglo-Saxon period. Catherine E. Karkov provides an overview of the strands of scholarship concerning the Ruthwell Cross; she emphasises the variety of approaches that may have resonated with the cross’s earliest viewers. Paul E. Szarmach suggests that The Fates of the Apostles may have been inspired by a series of panel paintings of the twelve apostles, such as those brought back to Monkwearmouth by Benedict Biscop, and by information gleaned from tituli. In an illuminating and carefully argued chapter, Joyce Hill uses two of the supplementary homilies to illustrate Aelfric’s use of Compilationes and epitomes of various sorts in his writing. She emphasises Aelfric’s unique contribution to the homiletic tradition: following the well-trodden path of his Latin sources and models while composing in the vernacular. She also notes the tendency in source-study to show bias towards the ultimate sources of texts, when intermediary sources are also important in tracing the lineage of a given work. Elaine Treharne champions the twelfth-century Southwick Codex, bound with the eleventh-century Nowell Codex (British Library, MC Cotton Vitellius A xv). She asserts that the Codex dates from the second half, rather than the middle, of the twelfth century. Martin Foys examines the representations of the fate of Harold Godwineson in the Vita Haroldi and William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum, tracing the rise to supremacy of William’s version and the marginalisation of the Vita’s version. He argues that both accounts demonstrate Harold’s voided kingly power, whether terminated on the battlefield of Hastings or transformed into the saintly form of a miles Christi.