The Early Textiles Study Group is hosting a conference called "Precious Cloth and Court Culture AD 400-1600", which takes place at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, on September 16 and 17.

The conference will explore court textiles and furnishings from both European and Asian courts. It will examine precious cloth as symbol of power and authority across the medieval world. Individual speakers drawn from institutions across England and from abroad (and including prominent independent scholars), will explore many aspects of the chosen theme. They will examine weave, braid and lace techniques, iconography and symbolism of precious cloth motifs, the role of the public display of the precious textiles (ceremonial and ritual), and many further issues (social, political, ecclesiastical, and economic  impacts of precious cloth across cultures from the West to the Near East).

You can find more information about the conference, including the programme (which sounds very interesting) plus a booking form, here.

Time for a post about interesting things, some of which you can participate in!

If you are in the Southampton area, there's a project about dexterity in flintknapping:With motion capture. How cool is that!

If you're more on the other side of the globe, there's the meeting of the Society for the History of Technology October 26-29, where there's a session about textiles and early industrialisation in planning. You can read more about the Society and their conference here.

There's also a conference about "Embellished Fabrics: Conserving Surface Manipulation & Decoration." It is the 11th North American Textile Conservation Conference, taking place in Mexico City, Mexico, November 6-11, 2017. The website is www.natcconference.com, and it will provide more information in case you're interested.

And another conference, this time in Poland, in June: Dynamics and Organisation of Textile Production in past societies in Europe and the Mediterranean. International Conference, Łódź, 21-22 June, 2017. The preliminary programme looks really nice and interesting!

For those of you who understand German (or for the adventurous of you who don't), there's a TV show where one guy participates in a club for one day, looking at the stuff people do in their spare time... and one of the clubs is a Living History group. You can watch the half-hour show here.

Some more interesting things - Jim Hines has done a survey about novelist's incomes. So if you've ever wondered whether writing a novel will make you rich, you might want to read his long, really interesting multi-part blogpost, starting with part 1 right here.

In 2011, a tunic was discovered in a Norwegian Glacier, and it has since been reconstructed. You can read a bit about the reconstruction and watch a video here. (I'm not totally happy with the spinning part of the video, as you might guess when watching it...)

And that's it for today. Hope you find something you enjoy among these!

As of today, registration for the IMC in Leeds is open, and there is even a late call for papers. Registration will remain open until May 14.

I've been to the IMC once, and it was an utterly glorious time (even though it was clearly not an archaeology-heavy conference). This year, it is on July 3-6, and the special thematic strand is "Otherness". If that tickles your fancy, and you can go there, I can heartily recommend it - the IMC is a huge, huge thing and a really interesting experience, with the opportunity to meet lots and lots of people from different mediaevistic strands of research. (Also, you have the IMC to thank or blame, for the fact that the Beast actually got finished at some point in time.)

If you'd like to know more about the conference, you can read the latest newsletter on their site with all the information necessary, or if you've already decided to go, venture straight to the registration page.

I'm travelling to Paderborn today to take part in a workshop about object-oriented research on clothing... so you're not getting a proper blog post. Nor will you get any blog post tomorrow, as I'll still be workshopping and travelling, to return late at night (and am, as usual, not ahead of my schedule...).

My paper for the workshop is about the reconstruction of historical tailoring techniques, and I'm really excited about it (plus, as usual, I hope that I have included all the bits that are of interest to the others attending, and left out all the boring bits). There's a long train trip where I'll hopefully be able to get some other work done, and then there will be the workshop, and there will be a conference dinner, and I'm quite delighted to get to see Paderborn again - I was there ages ago with a university excursion to see a big exhibition, and I remember it as a really nice place.

All sunshine and delight! Apart from the tiny little fact that I still have to go through my presentation at least once, and pack my clothes, and get a few other things done... and have to get up at oh-dark-hundred tomorrow morning to catch the train. (I think it's really past time that someone invents a new travelling method. A really fast one, that uses little energy and is okay for the environment...)

 

For those of you in the London area and with no plans for tomorrow, you could go to the Art Worker's Guild and attend the MEDATS meeting about textiles on the move. (Sorry for the utterly short notice - I only found out about this yesterday at night.)

MEDATS is short for Medieval Dress And Textiles Society, and it's aiming to improve public knowledge of medieval textiles and clothing. The Society is open to everybody interested in the topic, regardless of the background, and the topic of their meeting tomorrow - On the Move - sounds really interesting. The meeting starts at 11 am and ends in the late afternoon; more info, including the programme, can be found here.

I'd love to be there, but I haven't mastered the art of being in two places at once yet...

We've been planning the next European Textile Forum for a while - in fact, starting to look for a good date usually takes place very shortly after a Forum has finished, and we have all recovered a little bit. Then come a few months of not much ETF-related work (apart from thinking about a focus topic), and then, suddenly, it occurs to me that it's high time to write and send out a Call for Papers.

This is accompanied by putting together and testing a registration form, which usually meant quite a bit of headache and cursing. This year, it was actually easier even though I had to do the form again from scratch, as the Forum webpage has migrated to Joomla!. I'm quite, quite happy about this change, as it means more possibilities and less html-writing work for me.

So - I've finished writing the CfP, the website is almost ready to go live with the registration, I'm only waiting for a last little bit of feedback so I can set things in motion tomorrow... and I'm already looking forward to a wonderful conference again!

Oh, and if you'd like to have more info about the Forum, here's a brand new review of last year's conference.

 

There are two Calls for Papers open currently that have come to my attention (which usually happens through an email in my inbox). The first one is for Assemblage, Sheffield's peer-reviewed graduate journal of archaeology. Assemblage is currently seeking submissions for its 15th issue. Since 1996, assemblage has been run by postgraduate students at the University of Sheffield, and publishes articles and features on a wide array of topics related to the field of archaeology.

The publishers invite postgraduates and early career researchers to email articles between 3,000 and 5,000 words to Diese E-Mail-Adresse ist vor Spambots geschützt! Zur Anzeige muss JavaScript eingeschaltet sein. by 1 April, 2016.

You can access previous issues and view submission guidelines at http://www.assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk/.

The second CfP is really exciting, at least to me - as it's for NESAT! The next conference now has not only a place (Liberec in the Czech Republic), but also a date (May 22-26). The CfP is also open and will remain so until May 31. The organisers encourage papers that present lesser-known or recently excavated textiles, techniques and iconography that will generate discussion and exchange of information among conference attendees. In addition, this conference will include a poster session. Posters can be focused on any topic related to
archaeological textiles, but should be primarily visual.

You can find the schedule for the conference preparation here on the NESAT website, and the first entry also links to the full call as a pdf file.