Courtly love undressed
Subtitle: reading through clothes in medieval French culture
By: E. Jane Burns.
Series: The Middle Ages series
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2002
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 326
Subjects: French literature -- To 1500 -- History and criticism; Clothing and dress in literature; Courtly love in literature
Description: "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."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [295]-317) and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: Introduction The Damsel's Sleeve: Reading Through; title: Clothes in Courtly Love 1; title: Part I Clothing Courtly Bodies 17; title: 1 Fortune's Gown: Material Extravagance and the Opulence of Love 19; title: Part II Reconfiguring Desire: The Poetics of Touch 57; title: 2 Amorous Attire: Dressing Up for Love 59; title: 3 Love's Stitches Undone: Women's Work in the chanson de toile 88; title: Part III Denaturalizing Sex: Women and Men on a Gendered Sartorial Continuum 119; title: 4 Robes, Armor, and Skin 121; title: 5 From Woman's Nature to Nature's Dress 149; title: Part IV Expanding Courtly Space Through Eastern Riches 179; title: 6 Saracen Silk: Dolls, Idols, and Courtly Ladies 181; title: 7 Golden Spurs: Love in the Eastern World of Floire et Blancheflor 211; title: Coda: Marie de Champagne and the Matiere of Courtly Love 231.