If it is historically true that “clothing makes the man,” this collection of essays determines how that dictum was enacted in the Middle Ages. Désirée Koslin and Janet Snyder have assembled a variety of articles exploring medieval fashion and dress with a truly interdisciplinary approach. The scope of the collection is broad in several ways. The essays discuss textiles and dress diachronically from the Merovingian period of the seventh century to the sixteenth century. They combine the perspectives of archaeology, art history, economics, religion, costume history, material culture, and literary criticism, and explore fabrics from England, Ireland, France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany, and Italy. The authors consider the dress of not only the ruling elite, but of people from differing classes and genders engaged in various professions. The majority of the articles in this collection are the result of papers presented at a series of sessions entitled, “Medieval Textiles and Dress: Object, Text, Image,” held at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo in 1997. The editors divide the subjects into the early, central, and late Middle Ages. Not surprisingly, the amount of documentation and comparative material increases as the research progresses from early...