Courtly love undressed : reading through clothes in medieval French culture / E. Jane Burns.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Burns, E. Jane, 1948- author.

Series:

Middle Ages series.

Middle Ages Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

French literature--To 1500--History and criticism.

French literature.

Clothing and dress in literature.

Courtly love in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (335 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

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 Matiere of Courtly Love

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9780812291247

0812291247

OCLC:

889315242