Courtly Love Undressed : : Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture / / E. Jane Burns.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Penn Press eBook Package Complete Collection
• VerfasserIn: Burns, E. Jane,
• Place / Publishing House: Philadelphia : : University of Pennsylvania Press, , [2014]; ©2002
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Series: The Middle Ages Series
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- 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