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Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture

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Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture E. Jane Burns University of Pennsylvania Press 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page i Courtly Love Undressed 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page ii THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor Edward Peters, Founding Editor A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page iii Courtly Love Undressed Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture E. Jane Burns University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page iv Copyright © University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burns, E. Jane, – Courtly love undressed : reading through clothes in medieval French culture / E. Jane Burns. p. cm. — (The Middle Ages series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (cloth : alk. paper) . French literature—To —History and criticism. Costume in literature . Courtly love in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PQ.C B .′—dc 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page v This book is dedicated to my grandmother who always wore fancy hats and sparkling jewelry, to my aunt Alice who could transform a scarf into a turban with a few swift strokes, to my mother who taught me to love shoes, and to my aunt Zabelle who sewed elaborate Flamenco costumes on a portable sewing machine and then danced in them. It is also dedicated to my dad who was a natty dresser, to my uncle Marty who wore red suede shoes every Christmas, and to Fred whose preferred outfit is still a t-shirt and jeans. I wrote this book in the spirit of all those women who, as girls, played with dolls because of the clothes. 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page vi This page intentionally left blank 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page vii Contents Introduction The Damsel’s Sleeve: Reading Through Clothes in Courtly Love Part I Clothing Courtly Bodies Fortune’s Gown: Material Extravagance and the Opulence of Love Part II Reconfiguring Desire: The Poetics of Touch Amorous Attire: Dressing Up for Love Love’s Stitches Undone: Women’s Work in the chanson de toile Part III Denaturalizing Sex: Women and Men on a Gendered Sartorial Continuum Robes, Armor, and Skin From Woman’s Nature to Nature’s Dress Part IV Expanding Courtly Space Through Eastern Riches Saracen Silk: Dolls, Idols, and Courtly Ladies Golden Spurs: Love in the Eastern World of Floire et Blancheflor Coda: Marie de Champagne and the Matière of Courtly Love Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page viii This page intentionally left blank 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page 1 Introduction The Damsel’s Sleeve: Reading Through Clothes in Courtly Love This book offers a reassessment of courtly love through the lens of the elaborate garments that typify court life in literary accounts of the French High Middle Ages. It argues, in brief, that many of our most basic assumptions about courtly love are called into question when we consider them in relation to the varied functions of sumptuous clothes that provide social definition for key players in love scenarios. Indeed, our perceptions of courtly desire, of the range of gendered subject positions in love, of the negotiability of class status through the practice of love and even the symbolic location of the western court itself, begin to shift substantially when we consider them through the lens of the luxury goods and other bodily adornments that so often define courtliness. We will examine in par- ticular the lavish silks used to fashion elite garments, which are decorated in turn with gold and silk embroidery or with silver, gold, and jeweled orna- ment, and the equally ornate silks used to make bed coverlets, bed cur- tains, banners, and tents that festoon the courtly milieu. We will look at the standard unisex outfit of chemise, tunic, and mantle displayed on men and women alike, along with the more highly gendered male armor and female skin, as garments of another sort. Elite costumes wrought from natural ele- ments such as garlands of flowers and leaves, whether used materially or metaphorically to mark partners in love, will also come under consideration as key icons of courtly dress. What follows, then, is a study of material culture as it is represented in select lyric and romance texts, didactic literature, vernacular sermons, and sumptuary laws that imagine and construct various functions for luxury clothes and elite attire in the French Middle Ages. What historical individuals actually wore in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France, how those material objects were produced, consumed, traded, and displayed, is 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page 2 Introduction a different, though related, matter—one that has been amply researched by costume historians, art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and economic and cultural historians.1 We know, for example, that medieval clothing, in addition to indicating class differences, was used to mark reli- gious, military, and chivalric orders in the later Middle Ages and to single out pilgrims, Jews, Muslims, heretics, lepers, prostitutes, the insane, and individuals condemned to death.2 Studies of heraldry underline the impor- tance of color and iconography in recording family lineage.3 Some sources suggest that pious women may have used religious garb as a covert form of resistance against their husbands.4 And yet, the extent to which histor- ical individuals in French courts displayed on their person garments that resemble those described in literary accounts of courtly love remains more difficult to determine.5 Manuscript illuminations provide little help in this regard since the visual images that accompany Old French love stories from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries typically do not render courtly dress in the elaborate detail that narrative accounts provide. Scholars have most often understood the ostentatious display of luxury dress in courtly literature as a means of self-definition for members of the ruling elite. Following the lead of historians, we have rightly taken literary representations of courtly attire as a visible show of wealth and a public record of status.6 Literary scholars have further assessed the complex func- tions of cloth and clothing in courtly settings as indices of guilt or innocence in adultery, as subtle means of redefining political and personal identity through cross-dressing, as a code for gendering an otherwise unsexed amo- rous body, and as an incipient attempt to enforce social order between sta- tus groups.7 Conduct books reveal moral concerns about the production and consumption of fashionable clothes while also indicating that women’s management of clothing and linens provided new opportunities for self- definition.8 Embroidery and clothwork have been examined as a rich trope for the intersection of history and gender, while descriptions of cloth linings have been read as metaphors of literary representation.9 Underwear pro- vides a cultural icon of gendered social status in a range of medieval French texts.10 Clothing, furnishings, and personal objects bearing mottos enact a mystifying performance of aristocratic identity in the later Middle Ages.11 My interest here lies in exploring how the garments displayed on members of the ruling elite in courtly literary accounts were invoked and marshaled in a range of cultural discourses as potential—if not actual— regulators of gender, courtly desire, and the symbolic space of court life. In specific instances, such as sumptuary legislation, vernacular sermons, 00Front.qxd 5/17/02 3:44 PM Page 3 The Damsel’s Sleeve or didactic literature, we can see how medieval discussions of clothing convey cultural anxieties, expressing concern that individual items of dress have failed to perform an appointed or desired regulatory function. While French medieval sumptuary laws record the monarchy’s wish to enforce class distinctions through the regulation of luxury dress, vernacular exempla and sermons often document a clerical concern with making gender visible in clothes. At times, courtly literary texts reiterate and reinforce these cultural paradigms, using opulent garments to display noble wealth and signal elite status or to distinguish clearly gendered knights in armor from ladies in lavish gowns. But key scenes in lyric and romance texts also deploy clothing in more pointedly disruptive ways, as they narrate the trials and triumphs of protagonists in love. In these instances, lavish garments often subvert indications of class and rank they are designed to enforce, and luxury dress transgresses the gender boundaries it is presumed to uphold. Indeed, read- ing courtly love stories through the clothes of their protagonists will help us see that gender in courtly love scenarios is often configured along a sartorial continuum, rather than in terms of naturally derived categories of woman and man. A closer look at courtly garments will show further that fictive amorous encounters do not only enable and privilege the rise of men’s status through the practice of love, as we have often thought, but that the deployment of rich clothes can also enable, symbolically, an increase in the social status of women in love. In addition, the expression of female desire, so often effaced in courtly lyric and romance, can be registered in various ways through fabric and clothes. And finally, consideration of the geographic provenance of costly silks as imported goods will help revise our general presumption of court life as distinctively western, revealing instead a crucial easternness within the lush fabric and adornment of courtly pro- tagonists in love.
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