Dear colleagues,
I am pleased to announce the publication by Brepols of the edited volume of essays ‘The Hidden Life of Textiles in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean’. The book contains published papers of the conference ‘Textiles & Identity in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean: Paradigms of Contexts and Cross-Cultural Exchanges’ of the British School at Athens, held at the (Benaki) Museum of Islamic Art in 2016, as well as some new contributions.
The focus in this wide-ranging collection of studies by key scholars in the field is on textiles and their functions in various Mediterranean contexts (and beyond) during medieval and post-medieval times (ca. 10th-19th c.). The scope of the contributions encompasses archaeological, anthropological and art historical perspectives on a great variety of subjects, such as textiles from the Byzantine Empire and the Medieval Islamic World (e.g. Spain, Mamluk Egypt, Seljuk Anatolia), as well as the production and use of textiles in Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Armenia and Ethiopia. The volume offers a state-of-the-art of an often still hardly known area of study of textiles as historical and cultural sources of information, which makes it essential reading for scholars and a larger audience alike.

Table of Contents
Laura Rodríguez Peinado (Complutense University of Madrid) & Ana Cabrera-Lafuente (Museo del Traje, Madrid), New approaches in Mediterranean textile studies: Andalusí textiles as case study
Avinoam Shalem (Columbia University), Metaphors we dress with: Medieval poetics about textiles
Scott Redford (SOAS, University of London), Flags of the Seljuk sultanate of Anatolia: Visual and textual evidence
Maria Sardi (Independent scholar), Foreign influences in Mamluk textiles: The formation of a new aesthetic
Vera-Simone Schulz (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz), Entangled identities: Textiles and the art and architecture of the Apennine peninsula in a trans-Mediterranean perspective
Nikolaos Vryzidis (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), Animal motifs on Asian textiles used by the Greek Church: A case study of Christian acculturation (Appendix by Dimitris Loupis: Woven Islamic inscriptions)
Marielle Martiniani-Reber (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva), Quelques aspects des relations entre productions textiles byzantine et arabe aux Xe-XIe siècles
Elena Papastavrou (Hellenic Ministry of Culture), Osmosis in Ottoman Constantinople: The iconography of Greek church embroidery
Jacopo Gnisci (UCL), Ecclesiastic dress in Medieval Ethiopia: Preliminary remarks on the visual evidence
Dickran Kouymjian (California State University, Fresno), Armenian altar curtains: Repository of tradition and artistic innovation
Nikolaos Vryzidis, Concluding remarks: Textiles as units of transmission

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