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Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture
Clothing was used in the Middle Ages to mark religious, military, and chivalric orders, lepers, and prostitutes. The ostentatious display of luxury dress more specifically served as a means of self-definition for members of the ruling elite and the courtly lovers among them. In Courtly Love Undressed , E. Jane Burns unfolds the rich display of costly garments worn by amorous partners in literary texts and other cultural documents in the French High Middle Ages.
Burns "reads through clothes" in lyric, romance, and didactic literary works, vernacular sermons, and sumptuary laws to show how courtly attire is used to negotiate desire, sexuality, and symbolic space as well as social class. Reading through clothes reveals that the expression of female desire, so often effaced in courtly lyric and romance, can be registered in the poetic deployment of fabric and adornment, and that gender is often configured along a sartorial continuum, rather than in terms of naturally derived categories of woman and man. The symbolic identification of the court itself as a hybrid crossing place between Europe and the East also emerges through Burns's reading of literary allusions to the trade, travel, and pilgrimage that brought luxury cloth to France.
Burns "reads through clothes" in lyric, romance, and didactic literary works, vernacular sermons, and sumptuary laws to show how courtly attire is used to negotiate desire, sexuality, and symbolic space as well as social class. Reading through clothes reveals that the expression of female desire, so often effaced in courtly lyric and romance, can be registered in the poetic deployment of fabric and adornment, and that gender is often configured along a sartorial continuum, rather than in terms of naturally derived categories of woman and man. The symbolic identification of the court itself as a hybrid crossing place between Europe and the East also emerges through Burns's reading of literary allusions to the trade, travel, and pilgrimage that brought luxury cloth to France.
336 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 26, 2009
I really enjoyed the first section, and parts of the rest... it's more literary criticism than history, and as someone primarily interested in this case in historical dress, not literary symbolism as interpreted by a post-modern mind, well, I was unable to give four stars.
Still, good book, and it led me to other sources, and back to my French Lais, looking for traces of 12th century dress.
Still, good book, and it led me to other sources, and back to my French Lais, looking for traces of 12th century dress.
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April 17, 2023Read for FRN 320: Women Defamed, Women Defended
November 30, 2024
great supplement to my current arthuriana phase! predictably, especially, loved the parts that talked about guinevere and elaine of escalot!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews