Courtly Love Undressed – Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture

Courtly Love UndressedReading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture\nAuthor(s): E. Jane Burns\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, United States\nImprint: University of Pennsylvania Press\nISBN-13: 9780812219302, 978-0812219302\nSynopsis\nClothing 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.\n\n 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 rev.