(Ad)Dressing the Anglo-Saxon body: corporeal meanings and artefacts in early England (original) (raw)

2014, Blinkhorn, P and Cumberbatch C. (eds.) 2014. The Chiming of Crack’d Bells: Recent Approaches to the Study of Artefacts in Archaeology. British Archaeological Reports (International Series) 2677). Oxford: Archaeopress.

Early Anglo-Saxon dress, particularly that of women, could be an elaborate affair, often comprising several layers of undergarments, dresses, cloaks, mantles and headdresses, all held in place with elaborate brooches, girdles and belts, complemented by various pendants, purses and other accessories, and festooned with strings of beads. For all the many typological, chronological and technical studies of Anglo-Saxon dress objects, there has been almost no work looking at their use in structuring perceptions of feminine and masculine bodies. In this paper, I consider how different styles of dress current in the fifth and sixth centuries AD created different bodies, and how these manners of dressing guided movement, posture, gesture as well as emphasised different anatomical aspects of the male and female bodies differentiated by age and perhaps even ethnic identity. The core idea of this paper is that by bringing the body into the framework of artefactual analysis, we gain a more holistic comprehension of how objects and people work together to create identity.