Courtly love undressed: reading through clothes in medieval french culture
Editorial UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Mainland Spain
- Publisher UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
- ISBN13 9780812236712
- ISBN10 0812236718
- Type Book
- Pages 326
- Published 2002
- Language English
- Bookbinding Cloth
Sections
Medieval Literature EuropeanCourtly love undressed: reading through clothes in medieval french culture
Editorial UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
Mainland Spain
Book Details
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.