Robing romance: Fashion and literature in thirteenth-century France and Occitania (with particular regard to the 'Roman de la Rose', 'Flamenca', and 'Jehan et Blonde')

This interdisciplinary investigation takes issue with the view created by visual scholars that a system described by the-term “fashion” first arises in Europe around 1350. The dissertation begins with exploration of definition of “fashion,” adapting the view that fashion is a cultural system characterized by: a view of time which continually discards the immediate past, constant desire for change, and the consumption of objects which imitate a general model but offer the possibility of individual expression through choices of details. Fashion, defined as a desire, is a product of words as much or more than sight—words are what glory or banish styles. Written texts are proposed as the primary source for detecting the presence of a fashion system. Texts from thirteenth-century France and Occitania are analyzed to illustrate the existence of a fashion system in that earlier period.;Chapter 1 reviews theories on fashion, particularly drawing upon Gilles Lipovetsky, Roland Barthes, Herbert Blumer, and Charles Baudelaire. It concludes by establishing eleven necessary conditions for a fashion system's presence. Chapter 2 presents the three focus texts: the Roman de la Rose, Flamenca and Jehan et Blonde. Chapter 3 reviews the historiography of French medieval fashion, evaluating arguments for dating the birth of the concept of fashion. Chapter 4 examines the term “cointerie,” showing it to be connected with the semantic field of fashion in this period. Chapter 5 studies textual expressions of thirteenth-century fashion in terms of consumption of clothing and other objects of personal display, framed by reference to contemporary sumptuary law, which indicate increased interest in creating great effect at modest cost. Chapter 6 focuses on the increased demand for new vernacular compositions whose varied details follow a standard silhouette, and considers the relevance to the dissemination of fashion of innovations in book production and reading techniques. A concluding chapter examines anew the relation between fashion and time. The presence of fashion in French and Occitan texts is presented as a challenge to conventional ideas of periodization in literature and the visual arts, offering an alternative view of a cultural system often identified with the birth of modernity.