Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and Fashioning Conduct in Late Medieval Literature
- Author / Editor
- Smith, Nicole D.
Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and Fashioning Conduct in Late Medieval Literature
- Published
- Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
- Physical Description
- xi, 281 pp.
- Description
- Studies clothing in imaginative literature, arguing that writers of romances redirect the negative depictions of the courtly body found in clerical chronicles and penitential writings into positive images that convey virtue. While religious and political documents decried the immorality inherent in sumptuous clothing and attempted to restrain the behavior of individuals wearing stylish garments, writers (including Marie de France, Heldris of Cornuàˆlle, the "Gawain"-poet, and Chaucer) reimagine fashion-savvy aristocrats as models of morally sound behavior in a pedagogical program advanced not by preachers but by poets.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism