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I had been planning to attend:

Session 326 - Women of Medieval Italy: Papers in Honor of Christine Meek

because it included as the last paper the intriguingly-titled:

Representing Female Same-Sex Marriage in Fourteenth-Century Tuscany (William Robins)

But I discovered at the last minute that this paper wouldn't be appearing (reason unknown), so fortunately I still had time to rush next door and catch:

Dress and Textiles I: Makers and Methods

Since I ended up sitting in the front row, I didn't feel comfortable having the laptop out for real-time blogging, so this is more summarized than usual.

Rigid Heddle and Weaving Sword: Images of Band Weaving in the Manesse Codex (Cindy Ruesink)

Working from the Manesse Codex illustration of the lady being importuned by her poet-lover while doing band weaving, the paper presented a context for the type of equipment and product that are seen there such that the somewhat shorthanded version can be understood.

The Sign of Some Degree: The "Mystery" of Capping (Kirstie Buckland)

A brief history of English cappers' guilds, their activities and concerns, and the types of products they produced. For example, regulations repeatedly note that cappers are to make only knit caps and not ones make from cloth, and that they are not to use woolen thread that could be used for weaving. There was a tantalizing slide of a museum storage drawer with a dozen or so caps in it with the comment that there were nine or so total drawers like that at the museum.

Silk Dyers and the Growth of Fashion in Late Medieval Italy (Carole Collier Frick)

The correlation between the rise of an "international style" in dress, the shift to silk for high-end clothing, and the emergence of a complicated dyeing industry complete with a proliferation of imaginative color names.