The rhetoric of dress in medieval literature

This dissertation explores the intricate nexus of sartorial practices and sexuality in works by the Beowulf-poet, Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer, and the Gawain-poet. Ideas of gender or eroticism are almost always informed by dress in medieval texts from the heroic epic to the vernacular penitential. While costume historians and feminist critics have done much to sharpen our understanding of dress as it marks and constructs bodies and identities, there has not yet been an examination of the poetic discourse of dress that responds to and reshapes clerical and political unease. This project attempts to fill that void by suggesting that sexuality cannot be studied in isolation from contemporary clerical and political debates. I demonstrate how select poets refigure sartorial tropes in order to challenge the widespread assumption that the fashionable body was in need of spiritual rehabilitation.; Anglo-Saxon literature typically demonstrates a discomfort in negotiating sexuality by not speaking overtly about it; in Chapter One I show that battle dress conveys notions of sexual and narrative reproduction in Beowulf and the Exeter Book Riddles. For Marie de France and writers of twelfth-century romance, garments speak in different, but equally compelling, ways. Chapter Two argues that Marie sidelines the discourses of immorality invoked by clerics in favor for a poetic discourse that teaches restrained behavior through constrictive clothing in the Lai de Guigemar . Unlike Marie, Geoffrey Chaucer highlights the lascivious nature of the fashionable male in the Parson's Tale, the focus of Chapter Three. Drawing on medieval optical theory, modern feminist readings of the gaze, I illuminate Chaucer's complex views on the popular practice of using the penitential genre to curb social and sexual immorality. Finally, Chapter Four contends that the Gawain-poet refashions clerical unease associated with ornamented silk garments of the aristocratic court by using the lavish accoutrements to educate his audience in the arts of penance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.; Fashionable garments, often understood to excite lust in men and women, inspired clerics to insist on sartorial reform as part of moral reform. Yet this dissertation demonstrates that the Beowulf-poet, Marie de France, Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain-poet all recognize attire as a means to fruitful and meritorious ends in their respective rhetorics of dress.