PRESENTATION
Medieval Textiles in Iberia and the Mediterranean integrates documentary, scientific, and visual resources to advance medieval textile studies.
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Medieval Textiles in Iberia and the Mediterranean recognizes the vital place of the Iberian Peninsula within the greater world of medieval textile trade in the Mediterranean and beyond. It acknowledges the influence of the weaving traditions of Byzantium, the Mediterranean Basin, and the Central Asian silk routes upon textile consumption, production, and trade in the Iberian Peninsula. It also seeks to elucidate the place of al-Andalus’ (Islamic Spain) textile manufacture within medieval economic and commercial histories as well as in relation to the greater distribution of textiles and raw materials.
It is a central principle of this effort to look both inside and outside of the Iberian Peninsula (and certainly beyond the traditional Christian and Muslim divide) to refocus the lens through which we study textile objects. We recognize the multiplicity of Iberian contexts through which the textiles moved. We seek to elucidate the specificity of their cultural meanings, highlighting the vital role of sumptuous Islamic textiles in the crafting of medieval Iberian cultural identities. For this purpose, we make use of diverse evidence: archival documentation, literary sources, historical photography, nineteenth and twentieth century collecting histories, and epigraphic information, among others.
We also look deep within the objects themselves to open new lines of inquiry focused on the materiality of medieval textiles. Characterization of raw materials, textile technical studies, radiocarbon dating, and macro photography aid in comparing the provenance information encoded within the extant objects’ fibers with the historical documentation. These are essential elements to further elucidate questions of origin, dating, and the transmission of technical textile knowledge.
The aim of this effort is a comprehensive reevaluation of luxury woven goods from the tenth to the early sixteenth centuries. We start from the premise that extant textiles in Iberian contexts must reflect the diversity so clearly expressed in the historical documentation and literary evidence, which attests to a high volume of textiles from the confines of the greater Islamic and Mediterranean worlds which flooded Iberian markets. Our project intends to ascertain these connections or reveal the Andalusi origins of surviving objects in a pioneering integration of cross-disciplinary sources.
ABOUT THIS WEBSITE
The Medieval Textiles in Iberian and the Mediterranean website seeks to meet basic needs in the field of Iberian textile studies. First, it aims to consolidate a large group of dispersed objects currently held in museums, church treasuries, and private collections—many of them of very difficult access and rarely ever published—as a unified corpus. Second, it fulfils the necessity to complete and publish a pioneering Arabic epigraphic corpus of extant textiles in collections across the world. Lastly, it is an important first step in a long-overdue and systematic assessment of nineteenth and early-twentieth century textile collecting practices and their influence upon the field of medieval Iberian studies.
This website constitutes an integrated platform derived from the project’s database, kept since 2014. It makes available to the wider public an ever-growing collection of historical, documentary, and technical photography, collecting information (from the original location of works to the avatars of dispersion and final resting places of objects) bibliographic details, epigraphic material in Arabic, Spanish, and English. It also illustrates graphically the distribution of objects across the globe, both in terms of the original places of production and consumption, but also their contemporary distribution.
WORK IN PROGRESS AND A CALL FOR COLLABORATION
Medieval Textiles in Iberia and the Mediterranean is an ongoing digital effort. This website will grow as new material is acquired and processed, new collaborations develop, and the geographical scope of our inquiry expands.
We welcome your collaboration. If you see the need for corrections or would like to cooperate with missing material, we will be very happy to hear from you at:
WHO WE ARE
Medieval Textiles in Iberia and the Mediterranean is a large-scale, multi-disciplinary research program co-organized since 2014 by a team of academics, museum professionals, and conservation scientists in collaboration with museum and ecclesiastical collections in Europe and the United States.
Medieval Textiles in Iberia and the Mediterranean is made possible by generous funding from the Fondation Max Van Berchem (Geneva), the Pasold Foundation (London) and through collaborative arrangements between the following research projects: Las manufacturas textiles andalusíes: caracterización y estudio interdisciplinar (PI, Laura Rodríguez Peinado, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity, HAR2014-54918-P); The Medieval Treasury across Frontiers and Generations: The Kingdom of León-Castilla in the Context of Muslim-Christian Interchange, c. 1050-1200 (PI, Therese Martin, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity, HAR2015-68614-P). Ana Cabrera Lafuente´s work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 703711, Interwoven.
[LOGOS OF INSTITUTIONS HERE]
Contributors:
María Judith Feliciano, Independent Scholar (New York, New York)
She specializes in the visual culture of the medieval and early modern Iberian world. Her work focuses on the influence of the arts of Islam in the artistic developments of Peninsular and Viceregal societies. She has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, University of Washington and Seattle University and has been a guest lecturer at museums and universities internationally. She is the co-editor with Leyla Rouhi of Interrogating Iberian Frontiers: Cross-Disciplinary Approaches to Mudéjar History, Religion, Art and Literature, A Special Issue of Medieval Encounters 12.3 (2006). In textile matters, she is the author of “Sovereign, Saint, and City: Honor and Reuse of Textiles in the Treasury of San Isidore (León)” in Medieval Encounters 25.1-2 (2019), 96-123; “Medieval Textiles in Iberia, Studies for a New Approach,” in Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture. Essays in Honor of Renata Holod, ed. David Roxburgh (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 46-65; and “Muslim Shrouds for Christian Kings? A Reassessment of Andalusi Textiles in Thirteenth-Century Castilian Life and Ritual” in Under the Influence: Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Castile, ed. Leyla Rouhi and Cynthia Robinson (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 101-131. With Ana Cabrera Lafuente and Enrique Parra, she is the co-author of “Medieval Iberian Relics and their Woven Vessels: The Case of San Ramón del Monte (d. 1126), Roda de Isábena Cathedral (Huesca Aragón)” in Relics @the Lab. An Analytical Approach to the Study of Relics. Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2018, 43-76.
Ana Cabrera Lafuente (Museo del Traje, Madrid)
Her research has focused on the study of textiles, mostly from the medieval period, following her training in archaeology. Since 2001 she has worked as a museum curator. At present, she is Curator of Historical Fashion at the Museo del Traje in Madrid. In 2018 she was named Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Research Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London).
In 2016 she was awarded a Marie S.-Curie Fellowship at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her project, Interwoven, focused on the long history of collecting Spanish or Iberian textiles at the V&A and considered the provenance, raw materials, and textile techniques, among other criteria. (https://www.vam.ac.uk/research/projects/interwoven) She has participated in 12 research projects related to textiles and museum development and in different international and Spanish conferences and workshops.
She is co-editor with Lesley Miller of Silk,V&A and Thames and Hudson, 2020 and with Laura Rodríguez Peinado of La investigación textil y nuevos métodos de estudio, Madrid, 2014., (http://www.flg.es/images/publicaciones/investigacion-textil-nuevos-metodos.pdf).
She is member of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies (JMIS); Member of the Early textiles Study group (UK).and C.I.E.T.A (Center International d´Étude des Tissus Anciens), Lyon (France)
Laura Rodríguez Peinado
Silvia Saladrigas Cheng