Textiles and Textile Imagery in Early Medieval English Literature

Identifies and analyses a wide range of textile metaphors and imagery from peace-weaving in Beowulf to word-crafting in Elene.


Textile metaphors, or metaphors involving the process and product of cloth-making, occur widely in literary traditions around the world. The same phenomenon holds true among the peoples of early medieval England. As close observers of a long and culturally significant textile tradition, pre-Conquest English writers drew upon their close familiarity with spinning and weaving to create a wide range of metaphorical textile images in both Old English and Anglo-Latin literature.

This book examines early medieval English textile imagery in close detail, situating it within its cultural and material contexts and addressing the ways in which lived experience informed these metaphors, whether inherited, invented, or both. It explores imagery linked to themes of creation, peace, death, magic, and fate in a comprehensive variety of texts, including Beowulf and Elene, Anglo-Latin letters and riddles, the Exeter Book riddles, prognostics, penitentials, hagiographic and homiletic texts, medical collections, and glosses. Overall, it demonstrates how an understanding of this important body of textile metaphors alters and shapes the ways in which we read the literature of this period.