Roger II's red silk “coronation mantle” is arguably the most spectacular—and most discussed—extant object from Norman Sicily. But alongside it remain other intriguing garments attributed to the island's workshops, many later used in ceremonies of the Holy Roman Empire. These textiles—socks and an alb attributed to William II, funerary garments, and smaller items, such as a sword belt—are embroidered with images and inscriptions reflecting their origin on a multicultural Mediterranean island. Unlike many textiles with Arabic-Islamic motifs created in the medieval Latin world, often displaying “pseudo-Arabic,” these silks are inscribed with legible Arabic. Complicating our understanding of these garments are the facts that many employed an archaic form of Arabic script and that some were assembled from various earlier pieces. Isabelle Dolezalek's book takes up such questions as why Sicily's Norman kings (1130–1189) and their successor, the Hohenstaufen Frederick II (1194–1250), chose to adorn their royal silks with legible Arabic; who was meant to read these inscriptions; and how Arabic inscriptions functioned within the larger context of the Latin Christian kings’ self-presentation.

The fundamental question addressed in this book is whether these Arabic-language inscriptions represent continuity with the island's Arabic-Islamic past or an “active and conscious act of appropriation” (216) meant to signify something important about Sicily's new Christian rulers. Dolezalek sides with the latter option, in keeping with Jeremy Johns's now-classic Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily (Cambridge University Press, 2002), which argues that use of Arabic as an administrative language was discontinued after the Norman conquest and only adopted later (after the kingdom was declared in 1130) in imitation of the Fatimid Caliphate.

Indeed, Dolezalek believes that Sicily's Christian kings made programmatic choices to adorn themselves with Arabic, in full awareness and knowledge of its meaning (2)—a meaning unconnected to the religion of Islam. This thesis stands in opposition to the notion that they were participating in a broader Mediterranean “shared court culture,” a popular approach to studies of Mediterranean material culture. It also opposes the idea that Arabic inscriptions were appreciated in Latin contexts on purely aesthetic grounds and that the meaning of what was written mattered far less than its form. The legibility of the Arabic is indeed the core issue that makes the Norman silks unique among Latinate artifacts featuring Arabic lettering. This uniqueness led the earliest scholars of the Norman silks to propose a “triumphalist” thesis—that the Arabic inscriptions were meant to convey to the subjected population a message “of Muslim submission and Christian triumph” (64). Dolezalek also contests this idea; the selective appropriation of Arabic language and Arabic-Islamic style on the Norman silks was intended to send a message but not one of conquest and subjugation of the island's Muslims or of Islam itself.

In order to discover the meaning of that message and to address the finer questions about these textiles, the author considers them in a variety of contexts—those of textile inscriptions in Latinate culture, Fatimid textile production, Fatimid epigraphy, and Norman epigraphy. The Fatimid comparison is an important one, in part because of the author's reliance on Johns, and in part because both Fatimids and Normans were newcomers and religious minorities in their realms; thus she suggests that they would have used public inscriptions (in stone and on textile) in similar ways to cement their authority. Based on the fragmentary textual sources available, Dolezalek concludes that the Norman kings did not have a court textile-production institution like that of the Fatimids and that they did not simply take over an existing textile culture when they conquered Muslim Sicily. Rather, the Normans intentionally adopted the practice of inscribed textiles because they could convey both blessings and status. As to who would have read these inscriptions, Dolezalek can only surmise, since we have few accounts of Norman Sicilian ceremonies. Her supposition is that the textiles would have been used in royal rituals and that the Arabic might only have been visible in snippets to those who kissed the king's foot. If such courtiers would have been able to read the Arabic, and what they might have understood from it, remains unanswered.

More broadly, she places the garments and their inscriptions within the context of Norman multilingual epigraphy and asks whether the Arabic lettering was intended for Muslim viewers. Her answer is no, since the many multilingual documents and inscriptions (both royal and privately-commissioned) in Norman Sicily suggest instead a commitment to the appearance of political continuity; thus the use of Arabic as a political language was meant to display “an Arabic Mediterranean authority independent of papal recognition” (170). It is this element that serves as the book's ultimate argument about Roger's mantle: the “interdependence and rivalry between the Normans and the papacy” (188) led Roger to craft a visual style that combined an archaizing Arabic tradition with Latin ones, which “would make perfect sense as a means for the Normans to assert themselves toward the papacy” (189). As an argument, this is intriguing but not fully supported. Many questions remain about how this would have worked in practice (for example, is the theory that the popes would have understood these tropes or simply that the legibility of the Arabic mattered to Roger?) and why it was the papacy rather than other Mediterranean powers that mattered most to Roger.

Political continuity as a message is also Dolezalek's conclusion about the alb attributed to William II but likely assembled under Frederick II. It was constructed from various older pieces that she proposes were kept in the royal treasury and whose ages were well known. Thus the construction of a new garment from several older ones “provided symbolic representation of the permanence of the Sicilian kingdom” (206) and helped to support the Hohenstaufen's accession to the throne of the Norman kingdom.

I agree that the Latin rulers of Sicily were programmatic in their approach to royal self-image. Thus, I found much of value in this book. But it represents an only “slightly revised version” of the author's dissertation (ix), and the writing and organization suffer somewhat from this fact. Conclusions are withheld until the very end of each chapter—and of the book as a whole—and then only shallowly explained. Most of the ideas are tantalizing and accord well with other recent studies of Norman kingship, but they all need elaboration and deeper support. Nonetheless, for those interested in the material culture of a medieval multi-faith environment and those wondering how elements of Arabic-Islamic visual culture could help to promote the legitimacy of Latin Christian kings, this book will be of interest and importance.