Gale Owen-Crocker (born 16 January 1947) is a professor emerita of the University of Manchester, England. Before her retirement she was Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture and Director of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies.
Gale Redfern Owen was born and raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, and earned a first class degree with honours in English language and literature from Newcastle University in 1968 and a PhD with a thesis on Anglo-Saxon dress in 1976, also from Newcastle. [1]
After teaching at her former school and at Newcastle University while a student, Owen then took up a teaching position at the University of Manchester, where she remained until retiring as Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture and Director of the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies in 2015. She became Gale Owen-Crocker upon her marriage to Richard Crocker in 1981. [2] She is now Professor Emerita. [3]
Owen-Crocker co-founded and co-edited Volumes 1 through 14 of the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles [4] with Robin Netherton, and began a phased transition to the new editorial team in 2017 for Volume 15 and beyond. She was editor-in-chief for Brill's Encyclopaedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles c. 450-1450 (2012). [3]
Owen-Crocker has published six monographs, including one that is a collection of her papers on the Bayeux Tapestry, as well as eighteen edited or co-edited books and over 150 articles on Anglo-Saxon culture and Medieval Dress and Textiles.
Her scholarship and her tireless and generous mentoring of other scholars have been honored in two publications: A Festschrift edited by Maren Clegg Hyer and Jill Frederick in 2016 entitled Textiles, Text, Intertext: Essays in Honour of Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Boydell Press), and Making Sense of the Bayeux Tapestry: Readings and Reworkings, co-edited by Anna C. Henderson and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016).
Owen-Crocker is a prolific lecturer and has been invited to speak at events all over the world. Her warm and lively yet thoroughly scholarly presentation style has garnered her invitations to speak at academic conferences and prestigious universities, but she is equally at home presenting to the general public and to groups of re-enactors.
Embroidery is the craft of decorating fabric or other materials using a needle to apply thread or yarn. Embroidery may also incorporate other materials such as pearls, beads, quills, and sequins. In modern days, embroidery is usually seen on caps, hats, coats, overlays, blankets, dress shirts, denim, dresses, stockings, scarfs, and golf shirts. Embroidery is available in a wide variety of thread or yarn colour.
The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth nearly 70 metres (230 ft) long and 50 centimetres (20 in) tall that depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, led by William, Duke of Normandy challenging Harold II, King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings. It is thought to date to the 11th century, within a few years after the battle. It tells the story from the point of view of the conquering Normans but is now widely accepted to have been made in England.
The bliaut or bliaud is an overgarment that was worn by all genders from the eleventh to the thirteenth century in Western Europe, featuring voluminous skirts and horizontal puckering or pleating across a snugly fitted under bust abdomen. The sleeves are the most immediately notable difference when comparing the bliaut to other female outer clothing of the Middle Ages. They fit closely from the shoulder to approximately the elbow, and then widen from the elbow to drape to floor- or nearly floor-length. This garment's usage appears to be geographically limited to areas of French influence, with some works depicting the garment or the garment in transition as far away as Rome and modern Germany.
Anglo-Saxon dress refers to the clothing and accessories worn by the Anglo-Saxons from the middle of the fifth century to the eleventh century. Archaeological finds in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries have provided the best source of information on Anglo-Saxon costume. It is possible to reconstruct Anglo-Saxon dress using archaeological evidence combined with Anglo-Saxon and European art, writing and literature of the period. Archaeological finds have both supported and contradicted the characteristic Anglo-Saxon costume as illustrated and described by these contemporary sources.
Early medieval European dress, from about 400 AD to 1100 AD, changed very gradually. The main feature of the period was the meeting of late Roman costume with that of the invading peoples who moved into Europe over this period. For a period of several centuries, people in many countries dressed differently depending on whether they identified with the old Romanised population, or the new populations such as Franks, Anglo-Saxons, Visigoths. The most easily recognisable difference between the two groups was in male costume, where the invading peoples generally wore short tunics, with belts, and visible trousers, hose or leggings. The Romanised populations, and the Church, remained faithful to the longer tunics of Roman formal costume, coming below the knee, and often to the ankles. By the end of the period, these distinctions had finally disappeared, and Roman dress forms remained mainly as special styles of clothing for the clergy – the vestments that have changed relatively little up to the present day.
Shot silk is a fabric which is made up of silk woven from warp and weft yarns of two or more colours producing an iridescent appearance. A "shot" is a single throw of the bobbin that carries the weft thread through the warp, and shot silk colours can be described as "[warp colour] shot with [weft colour]." The weaving technique can also be applied to other fibres such as cotton, linen, and synthetics.
Barbara Yorke FRHistS FSA is a historian of Anglo-Saxon England, specialising in many subtopics, including 19th-century Anglo-Saxonism. She is currently emeritus professor of early Medieval history at the University of Winchester, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is an honorary professor of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London.
English embroidery includes embroidery worked in England or by English people abroad from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. The oldest surviving English embroideries include items from the early 10th century preserved in Durham Cathedral and the 11th century Bayeux Tapestry, if it was worked in England. The professional workshops of Medieval England created rich embroidery in metal thread and silk for ecclesiastical and secular uses. This style was called Opus Anglicanum or "English work", and was famous throughout Europe.
The Medieval period in England is usually classified as the time between the fall of the Roman Empire to the beginning of the Renaissance, roughly the years AD 410–1485. For various peoples living in England, the Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Danes, Normans and Britons, clothing in the medieval era differed widely for men and women as well as for different classes in the social hierarchy. The general styles of Early medieval European dress were shared in England. In the later part of the period, men's clothing changed much more rapidly than women's styles. Clothes were very expensive and both the men and women of lower social classes continued also divided social classes by regulating the colors and styles these various ranks were permitted to wear. In the early Middle Ages, clothing was typically simple and, particularly in the case of lower-class peoples, served only basic utilitarian functions such as modesty and protection from the elements. As time went on the advent of more advanced textile techniques and increased international relations, clothing gradually got more and more intricate and elegant, even with those under the wealthy classes, up into the renaissance.
The Bayeux Tapestry tituli are Medieval Latin captions that are embroidered on the Bayeux Tapestry and describe scenes portrayed on the tapestry. These depict events leading up to the Norman conquest of England concerning William, Duke of Normandy, and Harold, Earl of Wessex, later King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings.
Welbeck Hill is the site of Roman and early Saxon pottery finds, and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, located around 1.75 miles from Laceby, and around 3 miles from Riby, in North East Lincolnshire, England.
John D. Niles is an American scholar of medieval English literature best known for his work on Beowulf and the theory of oral literature.
Helen Damico was a Greek-born American scholar of Old English and Old English literature.
Jane Chance, also known as Jane Chance Nitzsche, is an American scholar specializing in medieval English literature, gender studies, and J. R. R. Tolkien. She spent most of her career at Rice University, where since her retirement she has been the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emerita in English.
Anglo-Saxon brooches are a large group of decorative brooches found in England from the fifth to the eleventh centuries. In the early Anglo-Saxon era, there were two main categories of brooch: the long (bow) brooch and the circular (disc) brooch. The long brooch category includes cruciform, square-headed, radiate-headed, and small-long brooch brooches. The long brooches went out of fashion by the end of the sixth century.
Haruko Momma is a philologist and a scholar of Old English literature and language. She has published on Old English poetic composition, Beowulf, philology in the nineteenth century, and teaching Old English. She is currently Professor of English at New York University.
Quita Mould is an archaeologist, specialising in small finds and the identification of leather.
Grace Christie (1872–1953) was an English embroiderer, teacher and historian of embroidery who published a comprehensive work on opus anglicanum in 1938, documenting every known example. "She is regarded as one of the most influential people in the early twentieth century with respect to the development of embroidery and embroidery studies in Britain and elsewhere."
Antonette diPaolo Healey is a philologist and a scholar of Old English literature and language. She has published on lexicography, glossography, and history of the English language. diPaolo Healey edited seven releases of The Dictionary of Old English (DOE), overseeing the development of the dictionary from physical material, microfiche, CD-ROM, through to the creation of the website. She is currently Professor Emerita of English at University of Toronto.
The Lichfield Angel is a late eighth-century Anglo-Saxon stone carving discovered at Lichfield Cathedral in Staffordshire, England, in 2003. It depicts the archangel Gabriel, likely as the left-hand portion of a larger plaque showing the annunciation, along with a lost right-hand panel of the Virgin Mary. The carving is thought to be the end piece of a shrine containing the remains of Saint Chad to whom, with Mary, the cathedral is dedicated.