Textile and Textile Imagery in Early Medieval English Literature: Traditions and Contexts. By Maren CleggHyer. Woodbridge and Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer. 2025. x + 246 pp. £85. ISBN 978 1 84384 744 1.

Textiles and textile work run through the heart of early medieval life, not just as material but as metaphor. Maren Clegg Hyer's book carefully traces connections between material and metaphor, showing how the physical act of making textiles shaped how people understood the world and their place in it. This book builds on the discussion produced in the author's 1998 doctoral dissertation, ‘Textiles and Textile Imagery in Old English Literature’ (University of Toronto), by expanding the body of evidence under review to include Anglo-Latin texts. The combined analysis of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts, along with a thorough understanding of the archaeological evidence for early medieval textile work, offers a comprehensive insight into the uses of textile metaphor in early medieval England. A throughline of the book is its focus on how central textiles were to early medieval life and so to the way people thought and wrote. Clegg Hyer begins by grounding her reader in the basics: the mechanics of spinning, weaving and finishing textiles. This background prepares the reader for the nuances that are drawn out later in the text where the importance of references to different working techniques in different metaphors is considered. The first chapter also includes an outline of the gendered and socioeconomic significance of textile production in early medieval England, providing the reader with all the necessary context to make the most of the detailed analysis of each metaphor that appears in the subsequent chapters. The second chapter addresses the metaphor of peaceweaver/peaceweaving, a widely discussed element of textile imagery from the early medieval English corpus. It refers to a person, usually a woman, who is understood to be helping to make or keep peace within or between communities and has often been understood as referring to noble women whose marriages helped secure alliances. This study advances the discussion of the metaphor both through a comprehensive analysis of Old English and Anglo-Latin uses of the metaphor and also by bringing a focus on the ‘weaver’ portion of the metaphor to the centre of the discussion. Where past analyses have positioned peaceweaving women as passive pawns in larger political dealings, Clegg Hyer turns this assumption inside out. By focusing on the effort, precision and creativity required of weaving, she recasts the peaceweaver as an active agent. Peace, in this sense, isn't something done through women; it's something they help build and maintain, thread by thread. This reading adds not only to our understanding of the peaceweaver metaphor but also to broader discussions of gender and agency in early medieval society. Clegg Hyer then turns to a darker side of textile imagery: a discussion of metaphors involving spinning, binding and weaving in magic, medicine and death. The analysis of these metaphors is comprehensive and offers productive comparisons to uses of similar metaphors in Greek, Latin and northern European sources, especially in the discussion of metaphors related to binding and weaving death. This discussion links nicely to the following chapter on connections between textile imagery and cosmic forces pictured as spinning and weaving fate. Central to this chapter is an analysis of how the Old English term wyrd is used in connection to textile metaphors. Wyrd generally means ‘what happens’ but is connected to ideas of fate. Clegg Hyer traces an ongoing discussion of whether wyrd denotes a pagan understanding of fate, a Christian image of Divine Providence or an overlapping idea that carries some pagan sense of the word into the post-conversion context. By considering the appearances of wyrd in texts containing textile imagery, Clegg Hyer builds a compelling case for the continuation of folk beliefs in the idea of fate as a force unto itself in post-conversion England. Comparisons are then drawn between early medieval English uses of textile imagery and fate and similar examples from classical, Germanic and Celtic traditions. While the discussion of these sources is detailed and clear elements of similarity are highlighted, Clegg Hyer is careful not to collapse the different cultural contexts together. While Greek and Roman fates spin, Norse fates cut threads of life, and Celtic fates are similarly focused on using threads. The early medieval English sources contain more imagery connecting fate to weaving. In all these traditions, however, fate is consistently imagined as female and as related to textile work. Clegg Hyer argues these connections point to cultural associations between women and the labour of birth and death, as well as to the centrality of textiles in the early medieval world. Finally, the metaphor of ‘wordweaving’ is addressed with the same nuance and rigour as the previous textile metaphors in the book. Uses of the wordweaving metaphor in early medieval English texts are compared to earlier Greek and Latin texts with attention paid to the awareness that early medieval English authors – Aldhelm serving as a constructive example – may have had or did have of these earlier works. As with her analysis of the various cultural contexts of textile imagery related to fate, Clegg Hyer draws connections between the classical and early medieval examples without imagining their uses of the wordweaving metaphor as a monolith. By comparing Anglo-Latin and Old English texts, this metaphor is understood as both part of a literary tradition from the classical world and an apt reflection of the range of poetic devices and linguistic features that characterize the complexity of Old English poetry. Clegg Hyer's book offers new insights into early medieval English texts and textiles alike, weaving detailed analysis of specific evidence with astute observations of the cultural context to which they belong. By reading metaphors of weaving, spinning and binding not as decorative flourishes but as reflections of lived experience, she invites us to see early English writing as part of a broader tapestry, one where craft, gender and creativity are tightly intertwined. This book has much to offer to readers interested in literature, archaeology and the complex connections between material and metaphorical worlds. 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