I eagerly awaited this book's addition to my reference library, having encountered many positive comments about it in the serious living history community. I was not disappointed. Author Gale Owen-Crocker manages to construct the near impossible: a narrow ground shared by archeological data and practical reconstruction. As a scholar and a reenactor, I found a wealth of material in the book to inform my understanding and guide my interpretation of Anglo-Saxon clothing, ornament, and accoutrements. In particular, I found useful the author's preliminary historical framework. The era and region today nominated "Anglo-Saxon Britain" are by no means cohesive, clearly definable, or set in stone. With every new research finding they shift and redefine themselves. Owen-Crocker succeeds, concisely, in making sense of this shifting historical landscape by first locating the extant body of knowledge and then exploring men's and women's dress (separately, as we can know them from archeology and supported conjecture)for three time periods: 5th and 6th, 7th to 9th, and 10th/11th Centuries.
The hallmark of a book's quality on this subject may be the unanswered questions it leaves. A poor book will answer more queries than the scholarly evidence can support. A fine book - such as this one - will answer enough questions to satisfy the eager learner and spur enough inquiry to encourage continued research into the deeply cached field of Anglo-Saxon cultural history.
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