ABSTRACT
In all the papers presented at the 2007 Everyday Objects conference one theme was evident: what is needed in the study of the culture of the everyday, most particularly that of the past, is genuine multi-disciplinarity.1 Those working on the art, the artefacts of the Middle Ages and the early modern periods, or the archaeological remnants, or the vocabulary which was employed to name the objects that were in daily use, cannot afford to remain narrowly focused on the evidence provided by their own discipline. The proper naming of medieval cloth and clothing has long been subject to precisely this kind of limited approach: studies by clothing experts, fashion historians and archaeologists oĞen employ modern terminology in an aĴempt to avoid confusion through anachronism, or else they use historical terms with perhaps insufficient concern for lexicological accuracy. The authoritative dictionaries are monolingual and largely reliant on canonical literary texts.2 In the introduction to her history of late-medieval costume, Mary Houston concedes that: ‘[o]ne subject of importance is, unfortunately, also a source of confusion, namely, the nomenclature of medieval garments. There is much diversity of opinion.’3 In a more recent study of medieval dress, François Piponnier and
Perrine Mane remark on the continuing difficulty of relating word and object in the categorisation of the relics and representations of medieval dress and textiles:
The difficulties in classifying this field arise from the multilingualism of medieval culture, combined with the fact that ‘[l]anguage has a tendency to develop at its own pace’,5 and the paucity of archaeological, graphical and textual evidence. Each of these issues contributes to the dislocation of signified and signifier with regard to medieval cloth and clothing and stands as an obstacle to an accurate understanding of the clothing lexicon.
