The lexis of cloth and clothing in Britain c. 700 - 1450: origins, identification, contexts and change

At the centre of the Project is the assembly and examination of textiles/clothing lexis in the early languages of Britain (Old and Middle English; Welsh, Old Irish, and minor Celtic languages; Anglo-Norman/French, Medieval Latin, Anglo-Norse), investigating the genesis and subsequent development of the vocabulary. The material will be published as a searchable database which is in effect an inter-language dictionary. Terms and their citations from both documentary and literary texts will be analysed in awareness of surviving textiles/dress accessories and graphic images in medieval art. The Project will investigate the complex relationships between vocabulary, artefact and image. Also included will be definitions in modern English of medieval technical processes and artefacts; and ‘thumbnail sketches’ of significant surviving artefacts.
At July 2010 the Project is progressing well. Images chosen from the PhD student's photographs are saved to an external hard drive and will be incorporated in the final product as the basis of a 'Picture Gallery' with other images that will be accrued. This is selective; it is not an attempt at comprehensive illustration of the database of words. The end date of the Project will have to move. 3 months was lost when the
Manchester-based RA resigned one week after appointment and it was necessary to re-advertise and re-interview. Stuart Rutten was appointed and worked for just over 3 years before resigning for family reasons. Another month and a half was lost before Mark Zumbuhl began work as his successor. He was appointed for 23 months. He had only just begun when he had an accident to his eye, at home in Oxford. He is signed off work for a month at present and we await the results of several operations before we will know the extent of the damage to his sight. I anticipate asking the AHRC to extend the Project to at least 30 April 2012. Meanwhile the Investigators continue with intermittent help from 2 hourly-paid researchers. We hope, depite the interruption, to carry out the plan to make the first part of the database available on line for testing by the end of 2010.