This book, which opens with an introduction by the editors, Bart Lambert and Katherine Anne Wilson, collects essays that distill the contributions offered in workshops and conferences held between 2010 and 2011 in such institutions as the University of St Andrews, Ghent University, and the European Institute in Florence. Interestingly, the traditional order in which textile history is investigated is reversed: instead of focusing first on production and then on commercialization and consumption, the volume analyzes consumption dynamics and the symbolic value of textiles as elements of distinction first, then moves on to their economic value and commercialization, and, finally, ends with the production process.

The contributions highlight the intricate commercial connections between Italy and the Low Countries, beginning with Wilson's considerations on fourteenth-century inventories listing the variety of Italian silks available in Dijon, where “silk and tapestries could be traded, purchased, possessed, displayed and reused.” In the seat of the Burgundian court, a thriving commercial center located on a major trading route, a wide range of individuals could afford to buy different types of valuable textiles as clothing accessories, for devotional purposes, or as household furnishings, proudly displaying them to demonstrate the status and wealth of the owner. Display was also the main purpose of Ercole Gonzaga's tapestries, “necessary, either for my honour or my convenience,” for his palace in Rome in 1558. Christina Antenhofer discusses the interior decorating wisdom that brought families to use the most expensive textiles and tapestries (many of which were precious enough to be used “as assurance for loans in times of financial hardships”) from their collection in the most public areas of the home, to “dress up” the rooms during important visits or big family events: a sort of “mobile furniture that could be changed and transported.” Similarly display focused was the use of the tapestries narrating the life of Saint Remigius, analyzed by Laura Weigert, the “luxury factor” of which “lay not only in the material value of the fabric, their scale, the expense involved in their production and the high quality of their design, but also in the fact that they were reserved for specific ceremonial occasions.”

Lambert's contribution on the “intertwinement of Italian financial interests and luxury trade at the Burgundian court” focuses on the use of luxury textiles to demonstrate the wealth of the state, even if they sometimes had to be bought and sold back to make liquidities available. In Central Europe the situation presented by Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli shows the increasing importance of Nuremberg as a market for Florentine merchants from the fourteenth century onward: impressive quantities of a surprising variety of products coming from Florence were available, although occasionally their quality could be disappointing, though it needed to “look expensive.” Despite sumptuary laws, as Jeroen Puttevils explains, many sought to improve their social standing by wearing clothes not befitting their rank, regardless of the severe penalties theoretically prescribed in most European cities.

The production of luxury textiles evolved, as explained by Peter Stabel for the city of Mechelen, with innovation being a key element in luxury textiles. As Franco Franceschi describes, the small-scale textile operations put to work entire families, even the youngest members—a skilled workforce that could be displaced because of political turmoil. Luca Molà highlights how local authorities were as eager to welcome specialized craftsmen as they were to discourage emigration of their own workforce, considered an essential economic resource. Graeme Small effectively draws the conclusions of this mosaic of contributions, stressing the “circularity” and enduring reciprocal relationships of these textile networks: Italian silks being traded in the Low Countries where, in the reverse, Italian merchants sourced woolens and tapestries for their home market.

Through the carefully researched, archive-based essays, two interesting points emerge. The first one is the self-evident value of luxury textiles as communication media, immediately recognized and appreciated by a wide public and used to send different messages to different audiences. The second is that, despite their cost and the prescriptions of sumptuary laws, expensive fabrics were available to a public not restricted to the social elite, but that extended to the middle classes: this factor furthered the expansion of the textile industry, which could not have thrived just with aristocratic patrons that, usually, were not even the best payers. Luxury textiles emerge therefore as powerful tools, the value of which extended far beyond their cost because of their extraordinary ability to effectively fashion social identities.