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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 enables us to see, and to be surprised totally by, what the texts themselves have to say."
"Burns argues persuasively that fabric and clothing can create representations of both gender and status in selected French courtly texts. . . . While grounded in solid readings of medieval texts, Burns's book also reflects and adds to recent feminist rethinking of clothing's capacity to empower women."
"This study of material culture provides a fresh picture of courtly love. . . . Burns gives true life to French literature of the high Middle Ages and provides careful readings of a variety of texts."
"An invigorating reassessment of the French literature of the High Middle Ages through the discourse of the dress and luxury adornments of court men and women. . . . The book sets very ambitious goals and accomplishes them with very dense readings, which vacillate from deceptively simple and clear analysis of twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts, to a much more profound understanding of those metaphors in a larger sociological context."
"Burns evinces a clear mastery of the subtleties of the array of primary texts she uses. . . . Her bibliography of both primary and secondary sources is substantial and well-rounded. Though history plays a part in her readings, her focus is squarely on the literary text. Her close readings are impressive in their analyses and command of the polyvalence of medieval vernacular."
Introduction: The Damsel's Sleeve—Reading Through Clothes in Courtly Love
PART I. CLOTHING COURTLY BODIES
1 Fortune's Gown: Material Extravagance and the Opulence of Love
PART II. RECONFIGURING DESIRE: THE POETICS OF TOUCH
2 Amorous Attire: Dressing Up for Love
3 Love's Stitches Undone: Women's Work in the chanson de toile
PART III. DENATURALIZING SEX: WOMEN AND MEN ON A GENDERED SARTORIAL CONTINUUM
4 Robes, Armor, and Skin
5 From Woman's Nature to Nature's Dress
PART IV. EXPANDING COURTLY SPACE THROUGH EASTERN RICHES
6 Saracen Silk: Dolls, Idols, and Courtly Ladies
7 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