ABSTRACT
The labelling of textiles has been a common practice since the Middle Ages.1 In many cases different kinds of labels were attached to the textiles, indicating the producer, the guild of the producer, a place of origin or specific product qualities.2 At the different places where labels for textiles were issued, specific systems for marking the textiles were practised. The practices of attributing value to products in early modern production and distribution are still among the desiderata of research, also for the reason that detailed documentation often tends to be scarce. The relations between the marking of products and the attribution of value are a subject which has only recently been approached more systematically.3 For most of commercial history, the marking of textiles
1 Reinhold Kaiser, ‘Mittelalterliche Tuchplomben – Überreste, Sammelobjekte und technik-, textil-, und wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Quellen’, in Horst Kranz and Ludwig Falkenstein (eds), Inquirens subtilia diversa. Dietrich Lohrmann zum 65. Geburtstag (Aachen, 2002), pp. 375-390; see also Evamaria Engel, ‘Signum Mercatoris – Signum Societatis. Zeichen und Marke im Wirtschaftsleben deutscher Städte des Spätmittelalters’, in Gertrud Blaschitz, Helmut Hundsbichler, Gerhard Jaritz and Elisabeth Vavra (eds), Symbole des Alltags – Alltag der Symbole. Festschri für Harry Kühnel zum 65. Geburtstag (Graz, 1992), pp. 209-231.
