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.

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This study of material culture provides a fresh picture of courtly love as portrayed in the literature of 12th- and 13th-century France. Burns (Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) reassesses those functions of luxury clothing that provide social definition for individuals in love scenarios. Her close readings demonstrate that clothing is not simply a show of wealth or an index of innocence or guilt. Luxury clothes may in fact subvert the very distinctions they usually seem to promote. Women use courtly garments to position themselves as "desiring subjects" rather than simply as "desired objects." Luxury dress occasionally suggests the blurring of traditional gender roles. Though courtliness is traditionally seen as a Western phenomenon, it is not surprising, given the role of the Crusades and the Frankish kingdoms in the Eastern Mediterranean, that Western courtliness is a cultural hybrid, depending in fact on Eastern opulence. Burns gives true life to French literature of the high Middle Ages and provides careful readings of a variety of texts, including La mort le roi Artu, the Lai de Lanval, Floire et Blanchefor, and the Chansons de toile. Useful for upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, and faculty. L. W. Yoder Davidson College

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