The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project, found through the Medieval Resources website, is a helpful source for those wishing to explore the clothes of Britain from c. 700-1450. The site contains a vast, searchable database of medieval clothes along with with the terminology of the textiles.
Sources
The website has a great amount of sources, all necessary for ensuring accurate information about the clothing. They cite many reference dictionaries, including those for Old English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, etc. These dictionaries were used to make more sense of the artifacts being studied. The artifacts themselves come from a variety of sources. The creators of the project had some of them, while others were sourced from various museums, usually the Museum of London.
Processed
These sources were processed by a variety of scholars with a knowledge of Medieval textiles and clothes. In order to sort the information in a meaningful way, it was organized first into three categories: clothing and accessories, lifestyle/daily life, and a timeline for more miscellaneous objects. Each category was then sorted into subcategories, and then those subcategories into more subcategories, until the most similar items had been grouped together.
Presentation
The layout of the website is fairly simple. It uses the organized information from the processing stage to categorize topics. The gallery has links to categories, which then extend into subcategories and go on until a very specific list comes up. This is shown in the images below:
If you are looking for details on an item you already know, you are also able to search the database using a couple of options. The quick, advanced, and browse options ensure there is a way to find a topic easily.
About the Project
The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing was created with the help of a grant by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It was a 5-year effort, intended to create a database of all of the known kinds of medieval dress and textiles, along with pictures and accurate vocabulary. This project used both history and many different languages to get the information that was needed. The project is open access but not open sourced, meaning that anyone can view it, but not everyone can edit it. It’s hard to imagine anyone except scholars using this website, but I can see how someone may want detailed information about medieval clothes for a book or recreation.
One reply on “Medieval Clothing”
I like your use of images to show how the project is organized. You also do a good job of instructing the reader on how to navigate the project. Are you able to see who owns the items of clothing?