Linen Armour in the Twelfth Century
The first part of my three-part series on medieval linen armour has appeared in Medieval Clothing and Textiles 18. Whereas in some periods linen armour is commonly showed in paintings and sculptures, there are very few pictures of fabric armour from western Europe between 500 and 1250 CE. No quilted garment survives from Europe in this period either. So I discuss about thirty texts from this period. I work with texts in Greek, Latin, Old French, Ibero-Romance, Irish, Middle High German, Old Norse, and Arabic, and provide my own translations of the Greek, Latin, Romance languages, and Middle High German. Whereas most books summarize and allude to a few of these texts, I put them in context and give both the original language and a translation.
Sean Manning, “Quilted Armour in the Frankish Countries, Part 1: The Twelfth Century,” in Cordelia Warr ed., Medieval Clothing and Textiles 18 (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, 2024) pp. 1-40 https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781837651856/medieval-clothing-and-textiles-18/ PDF copies available to anyone who asks when I get around to scanning it.
This project started in January 2019. Part 3 will not appear before 2027. Serious research in the humanities takes time!
Edit: You can find a list of sources and bibliography here
Good evening,
I am very excited to read your findings regarding textile armor! I am particularly curious what you have made of Choniates’ brine of wine treated armor on Conrad, that passage has always seemed a bit unique to me. I did some apocryphal testing of the treatment with varying levels of salinity which seemed to have positive effects, but it wasn’t serious enough to write about. Do you have an opinion about the reference in the Cattle Raid of Cooley? I see it isn’t in your list of sources. It would be quite early if it’s from an early version versus an addition from a later text. If possible, I would love to get ahold of a .pdf copy of the article.
Kind regards,
Benjamin Lanteigne
I don’t think I had a lot to say about the passage in Nicetas Choniates which I did not say in Mouseion https://doi.org/10.3138/mous.17.3.003 (just reframing it for an audience of medieval experts not ancient experts) Jess Finley has experimented with the fifteenth-century recipe for hardening linen for jacks which I found but last time we talked she was still trying things out. Someone showed Tod the cutler a recipe of similar vintage for making arrow-proof shields, but I can’t think of any of those which involved wine or salt (the recipe for jacks involved wort which ale and beer brewers need).
I talk about the Cattle Raid of Cooley or Táin Bó Cúalnge under source i.5
Hello! Are there scans of your article available, or do we need to go through Boydell press?
I can email you a copy. B&B is a small independent publisher so I am giving them a year or so before I post it publicly. You can get people to do research for free but copyediting and layout and graphic design and printing are harder.