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Previous bibliographical coverage


There is little recent bibliographical coverage of costume history available to recreators. Pegaret Anthony’s annotated bibliography Costume: A General Bibliography was first published in 1966, and an enlarged and revised edition was prepared by Janet Arnold and printed in 1974. This bibliography is certainly of interest, particularly for its list of sources to search, yet its broad scope—offering a light coverage of all times and places—lack of current material and terse annotations mean it does not meet the needs of the recreation community. Only a small number of the works listed refer to medieval costume, while a slightly larger number cover 16th century clothing. The structure and annotations, also, are not designed for use in tracing sources for a particular time or place. In the decades since this bibliography’s publication there have been new discoveries, new analyses and many new publications.

Most other bibliographies are either aimed at theatrical costume, such as Jackson Kesler’s Theatrical Costume (c1979) and Blanch Merritt Baker’s Theatre and Allied Arts; A Guide to Books Dealing with the History, Criticism, and Technique of the Drama and Theatre (1967), or were written so long ago that they are useful more as historical documents than as current tools, foremost among these being Hilaire Hiler’s Bibliography of Costume; A Dictionary Catalog of about Eight Thousand Books and Periodicals (1933, reprinted 1967).

Aside from this there are booklists in the unpublished “grey” literature of living history clubs and in some costume and recreationist Frequently Asked Questions files. After posting my interest in producing a costume bibliography to the recreationist newsgroup rec.org.sca and asking for examples of any other known bibliographies, the only title mentioned in reply was that of an unindexed annotated bibliography which was republished in 1986 by members of the US-based Society for Creative Anachronism as an article “General Bibliography of Costume” in volume 39 of the Compleat Anachronist series of publications. This is an interesting article and considerably nearer the mark, but its lack of finding aids, small scale and the absence of the last decade’s major works leave scope for a useful and current work.

All private responses to postings announcing the bibliography included requests to be sent a copy of the finished bibliography when complete. This, combined with similar statements from local recreators, suggests an interest in and need for a recreationist costume bibliography (see Appendix A).


content and format: Alternative responses


In determining the appropriate response to the gap in bibliographic coverage of historical costume I was faced with a range of options. One was that the bibliography could be entirely original, or alternatively could be a sizeable revision and expansion of a bibliography like the “General Bibliography of Costume”. An original work was chosen to fulfil the requirements of the project. The choice of format largely determines—and is determined by—whether the bibliography is fixed or can be updated, and also affects the searching options available to its users. Format is also a decisive factor in availability: a printed booklet is likely to be more heavily used and more thoroughly read, while a database on the web is available to be referenced by people around the world.

The ideal recreationist costume bibliography has two different sets of characteristics. On the one hand, it is readable—not just searchable—portable and can be used by people who don’t have constant web access. This bibliography is likely to be a printed booklet.

On the other hand, the ideal bibliography should be able to be updated as significant new resources come along, rapidly searchable and available to recreators everywhere. A database accessed through the World Wide Web seems to best fulfil these requirements, and indeed Web hosting has already been offered for it.

In response to these conflicting requirements, and given the resources and time available, I have prepared in print format the first edition of a bibliography which will later migrate to the Web where it will be updated. Alternatively, the print version could be produced in small runs or on demand, to keep pace with revisions.


Scope


The prime criterion is that the bibliography be useful to medieval recreators, and particularly to recreators in New Zealand.

The subject of the bibliography is costume, here defined as clothing, dress accessories and armour. Weapons will be included only to the extent that they were in some times and places dress accessories. Ritual and occupational clothing such as ecclesiastical dress, coronation robes and academic dress will be included. In general, costume resources become more prolific and of better quality the later the period under study: while Anglo-Saxon clothing is the topic of one book and a number of articles which piece together the clothing from cloth fragments, jewelry, literary descriptions and manuscript illuminations, Elizabethan clothing has tailors’ pattern books, museum exhibits of mostly intact items of dress, and detailed accounts and portraits. This means that in presenting good-quality resources for costume recreators it is easier but less useful to weight holdings towards the later end of the period.

To provide the maximum benefit to this audience in the time available, this bibliography is selective, focusing on the better resources for reproducing costume from the times and places most central to medieval recreation. Good resources are authoritative, well-illustrated, and instructive. They are authoritative in referring to primary sources or contemporary secondary sources, documenting the development of their reasoning, and stating their assumptions. Illustrations are a matter of concern to recreators: are the pictures photographs of original garments, manuscript illuminations, paintings or sculptures? Or are they re-drawings of these sources? If they are re-drawings, are they accurate representations of the originals? Costume resources may also be instructive, giving useful information on sewing technique or colour distribution. As well as entries for good resources, it may be found useful to describe the strengths and weaknesses of items which are readily available in libraries and bookshops and therefore likely to be discovered by anyone researching medieval and Renaissance clothing.

The geographical scope is Western Europe, including the British Isles and Scandinavia. The uneven availability of primary resources, however, means that some influential works refer to the fringes of Western Europe such as Greenland, where conditions preserved several dozen actual sets of clothing from the 14th century, and Bohemia, which has been well-served by its art historians. The clothing of Byzantium has been mentioned in passing, as an influence on Western European clothing, rather than as central to the scope of this work. The significantly different nature of costume of the Middle East, which is also the subject of some medieval recreation, means that area would be better served by its own costume bibliography.

The temporal scope of this bibliography matches the scope of the main recreation groups in New Zealand. While the focus is costume of “medieval” times—often defined in an English context as extending from 1066 to 1485, or between the battles of Hastings and Bosworth Field—the overall span of recreation is somewhat wider. In New Zealand, there are recreationists operating in periods from about 800 to 1650 AD. With the addition of a few listings showing the early classical and Germanic antecedents of medieval dress, this is the scope covered by this bibliography.

Items in the bibliography are primarily books, articles and pamphlets. There is a non-exhaustive appendix giving details of some Web sites as a starting point for further research by readers, but these are not a central part of the bibliography at this time. Print contents include archaeological descriptions of textiles, social histories of wardrobe accounts, analyses of clothing represented in portraits and illuminations, purpose-built resources for the production of recreation gear, and traditional books on costume history.

Because the aim is to provide a tool for recreators in New Zealand, access was an issue in selection. This has two faces: resources should be available for use, and they should be understandable. Thus most items listed are held in New Zealand and are available in the English language. Untranslated major works have been included where they have particularly useful diagrams and illustrations, or where significant summary material is available in English, as have a small handful of resources supplied by international document delivery or from private collections which are documented as being the best or most influential in their fields.

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