Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (review)

The ‘sea of silk’ of the title of Jane Burns’s book refers, on the one hand, to the historical network of medieval trade routes that connected the Christian West to the Muslim world and Byzantium, and, on the other, to the metaphorical community of fictional women who worked silk along the shores of the medieval Mediterranean. The book is a continuation of and a companion piece to Burns’s 2002 Courtly Love Undressed: Reading through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press), which focused on courtly heroines wearing silk garments. In an age when Eastern silk garments were often recycled as ecclesiastical vestments in the West, silk becomes a marker of a ‘hybrid existence’ (p. 119), a signal that boundaries between East and West are blurred. Historical documents are not explicit about the gender of medieval silk workers, but in literary texts it is always women who are portrayed as making and handling silk clothes and luxury objects. Reading the story of the three hundred silk workers in Chrétien’s Yvain alongside the economic history of the medieval Mediterranean, Burns points to the existence of an economic as well as a symbolic connection between the medieval trade in silk and the trade in (women) slaves (Chapter 2). Silk works as a metaphor for the enslaved (both literally and figuratively) women in medieval society. Nevertheless, women’s active role as workers of silk sometimes allows them to regain control over their bodies and to exert political influence. Burns offers illuminating readings of some well-and lesser-known works and makes useful comparisons between Jean Renart’s Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole and the anonymous Dit de l’Empereur Constant (Chapter 3) and Aucassin et Nicolette and Roman d’Enéas (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5 the often neglected female characters of Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, the French queen and the Byzantine queen, are studied. The hybrid nature of silk objects can represent and trigger female agency, as Renart’s romance shows. Lienor uses her aumoniere and ceinture, embroidered with Islamicate patterns of fish and birds, to restore justice and marry the man she wants. By contrast, her wedding gown is decorated with the story of Troy, which Burns sees as ironic, ‘for Helen’s story could not be more different from hers’ (p. 97). As the book progresses, its focus widens, and gold, relics, and wealth in general are discussed. This allows Burns to demonstrate the continuity that exists between silk and these other materials and objects in the medieval imagination. The all-important final chapter brings together the literary and historical threads of the book. Focusing on the relic of the Virgin’s chemise from Chartres and the tradition associated with it, Burns demonstrates how an image ostensibly conceived as Christian and Western may bring together different traditions and open up cultural imagination. Locally produced linen and exotic silk meet and interweave in this hybrid artefact. An important contribution to postcolonial medieval scholarship, Burns’s monograph reads medieval French texts ‘for silk’ in order to open ‘narrative keyholes’ on to distant lands while also showing that they may have been not so distant after all.