Precious Cloth and Court Culture

This book examines the use of precious cloths in courtly settings East and West between the fourth and the sixteenth centuries. The fresh evidence, drawn from surviving precious cloths together with new interpretations of contemporary written and visual sources, allow for an exploration of common mentalities evident behind the use of precious cloths over the period of more than a millennium and across a vast geographical expanse.

The seeds for the writing of this book were sown in 2017, at an international textile conference, 'Precious Cloth and Court Culture', held at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. The aim of the conference was to draw together textile specialists from across the world to examine how far contacts between courts from Europe to China were mediated through the use and exchange of precious cloth. For the first time, precious court cloths were examined as agents of cultural identity, and as global medium and catalyst for political and socio-economic development and change.

The book encompasses the findings of the conference whilst greatly extending its original scope through the addition of new material and also through the reworking, amplification, and inter-linking of common themes across the original papers. In line with current interest in the mapping of 'global histories' the book draws on the textile evidence from right across the medieval and early modern world. Over the period of an entire millennium, this enables a series of parallels to be drawn between the use of precious cloths across Latin, Byzantine/Islamic Mediterranean, Near Eastern, Central Asian and Far Eastern courts.

The eleven chapters which make up the book are divided into two sections. The first section consists of seven chapters and geographically covers Latin Europe and the Byzantine and Islamic Mediterranean, whilst section two with four further chapters, moves the discussion across from Eurasia to the Far East. It is the first publication to draw together evidence from both East and West in order to assess the nature of and the very considerable impact of the use of precious cloth across courts of the mediaeval and early modern world.