This volume celebrates the tenth year of Medieval Clothing and Textiles with the interdisciplinary range of approaches that this series has always emphasized. The articles in this volume examine not only the obvious roles of garments and fabrics—to provide warmth, decency, and comfort—but also their social and artistic significance in the medieval and early modern periods.

Three of these papers focus on practical matters of clothing and textiles. Maureen C. Miller describes a remarkable collection of medieval vestments surviving at Castel Sant’Elia in Italy; unlike most such survivals, those at Sant’Elia include utilitarian examples alongside luxury ones. Rebecca Woodward Wendelken provides an overview of the cultivation of silk—the luxury fabric of the Middle Ages—and its spread to Western Europe before 1300, and summarizes the published scholarship on the subject. Lisa Monnas examines some of the medieval colour terms for desirable cloth, refined in the light of some extant examples, and provides definitions that should prove extremely useful to future scholars.

Two articles delve into the social and monetary value of clothing. Michelle L. Beer examines the transformation of the wardrobe of Margaret Tudor, daughter of the English King Henry VII, as she undertook a great dynastic marriage to James IV, King of Scots, exhibiting the power and prestige of her father’s Tudor monarchy through her clothes and her domestic furnishings. Christine Meek’s ongoing research into the documents of fourteenth-century Lucca reveals details of working-class wardrobes through accounts of garments seized from debtors.

Two essays address artistic representations. Valija Evalds’s study of the female heads on roof bosses of St. Frideswide’s Priory in Oxford focuses on the significance of portraying headdresses that were old-fashioned at the time they were carved. Christopher J. Monk demonstrates how Anglo-Saxon artists depicted household textile furnishings to indicate emotional tensions and complex human relationships in the narratives they illustrated.

Finally, in an exercise in historiography, Elizabeth Coatsworth examines the life and achievements of a previously obscure figure, Mrs. A. G. I. Christie, whose pioneering English Medieval Embroidery remains a classic text. Christie’s approach to medieval embroidery was influenced by her own skill as both artist and embroiderer and by her association with the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.