In this article I describe an encounter with a fifteenth-century manuscript and its assertive "fifteenth-century-ness," as exemplified by the style of dress in this manuscript's miniatures. While this historical specificity would normally offer a premise for reconstructing the past, I instead feel a powerful sense of difference and distance. Try as I might, I cannot "fit" into clothes in this manuscript's images, as they are tailored to the life of different person in a different time. This temp