Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-317) and index.
CONTENTS NOTE
Text of Note
Fortune's gown: material extravagance and the opulence of love -- Amorous attire: dressing up for love -- Love's stitches undone: women's work in the chanson de toile -- Robes, armor, and skin -- From woman's nature to nature's dress -- Saracen silk: dolls, idols, and courtly ladies -- Golden spurs: love in the eastern world of Floire et blancheflor.
0
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
"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.
Text of Note
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."--Jacket.
TOPICAL NAME USED AS SUBJECT
Clothing and dress in literature.
Courtly love in literature.
French literature-- To 1500-- History and criticism.
Amour courtois dans la littérature.
Costume dans la littérature.
Littérature française-- Avant 1500-- Thèmes, motifs.