This book identifies and analyses 196 textiles used by Spaniards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is an essential complement to the author’s study of Spanish costume in the Habsburg period, also published in this collection. Both works are based on numerous texts belonging to a broad variety of literary genres, as well as historical documents taken from written and manuscript sources. This outline of a dictionary is illustrated with more than 60 examples of textiles preserved in Spanish and foreign museums; many of them are reproduced here for the first time as a testament to the use of textiles, the manner of dress and the evolution of fashion in the Golden Age.

Miguel Herrero García (1895–1961), a secondary school professor of Latin and collaborator with the Centro de Estudios Históricos, taught Spanish literature at Cambridge and Middlebury College (Vermont, USA). A prolific writer and reputed Spanish Golden Age scholar, he focused his research on the ways of life, both public and private, of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards as reflected in the literature of the period. Prominent among his works are Estimaciones literarias (1934), Ideas de los españoles del siglo XVII (1926, 2nd ed. 1966), Nueva interpretación de la novela picaresca (1942), Contribución de la literatura la historia del arte (1943) and a critical edition of Cervantes’s Viaje del Parnaso (1983).