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This essay argues that Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) used clothing in a highly intentional and performative manner to communicate his status and authority. His audience, however, was quite limited - essentially, the small community of those who aspired to hold or influence the power of the Holy See - and the messages conveyed were not particularly complex. Attempting a reception history of papal attire c.1300, the essay surveys remarks regarding clothing in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century chronicles and analyses in depth the evidence of two sources: ambassadorial reports to King James II of Aragon (1291-1327) and the De electione et coronatione sanctissimi patris domini Bonifatii pape octavi of Cardinal Jacopo Caetani Stefaneschi (c.1270-1343). A suggestive finding is that performativity, or the highly theatrical use of garments, appears to have been used by Boniface VIII to foster dissemination of simple communications across great distances.

Using evidence from both papal and cardinal inventories, as well as from cardinal wills, this essay argues that the papal curia developed a distinctive language for describing liturgical vestments in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries that emphasised the peoples and places that made the materials and ornaments of these garments. Examples from inventories of local dioceses and religious houses are offered to illustrate the peculiarity of the curial descriptions, and comparisons are also made to royal and mercantile inventories. While the curial emphasis on the places and peoples producing the materials used in ecclesiastical vestments may simply have been the performance of connoisseurship within an elite institutional culture, the author suggests that it may also express the expansive papal claims to dominion articulated by Boniface VIII (1294–1303) and his immediate successors.

As a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium "Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines," this essay traces the origins and development of Bynum's interest in the material artifacts of late medieval Christian spirituality. The author narrates these evolutions through analyses of a single object, the Louvain beguine cradle from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The essay begins by treating Bynum's research from the 1980s to the early 1990s as moving toward a "visual theology" and then charts her movement from an interest in matter to an interest in materiality over the second half of the 1990s and first decade of the twenty‐first century. Finally, the author uses the Louvain cradle's appearance in Bynum's most recent book, Dissimilar Similitudes, to articulate and reflect upon her contribution to material culture studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]