Fashioning Change: The Trope of Clothing in High and Late-Medieval England by Andrea Denny-Brown (review)

Andrea Denny-Brown’s rich study begins with a critical commonplace: clothing has inherently transformative properties. Prior analyses of dress in medieval literature have tended to measure these transformations in terms of identity and self-hood. Denny-Brown charts new territory by reading fashion’s inherent changeability as an index of cultural change, material transience, and poetic innovation.

In Chapter One, Denny-Brown argues that Boethius figures his central argument in his Consolatio in terms of dress: Fortune’s manipulation of her subject’s garments bespeaks both shifts in material gains and losses and the randomness of earthly power. While material goods are not prevalent in the Consolatio, Boethius’ experience of personal loss initiates philosophical and literary projects that undergird Denny-Brown’s entire study. Attire allows for an exploration not only of medieval desires but also poetic aesthetics, as seen in the Consolatio’s own shifts between meter and prose that mark Fortune’s capricious whims.

Where the first chapter establishes a textual prehistory that understands dress in broad terms to convey an allure of attire as a trope of change, Chapter Two turns to particular sartorial details of contemporary clothing in order to illustrate the evolution of Fortune as an emblem of—and for—fashion. In tracing the development of Fortune’s own dress as depicted by writers such as Alain de Lille, Jean de Meun, Geoffrey Chaucer, Guillaume de Machaut, and John Lydgate, Denny-Brown charts a trajectory of cultural change mediated through dress: Fortune’s clothing spans a range of signification from conspicuous consumption to self-fashioning.

Chapter Three takes as its subject the luxurious ecclesiastical garment, the capa (cape or cope), as it is represented in Bishop William Durand’s Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (Rationale for Divine Offices) and a short satirical Latin poem, ‘Song Upon the Tailors.’ Denny-Brown argues that each text engages the contemporary legislation that sought to distinguish ecclesiastical garments from secular fashions by presenting the former as unchanging and endorsed by the Bible. She finds a connection between changes in fashion and evolutions in literary interpretation in the high Middle Ages, reminding her readers that biblical exegesis has long been connected to clothing metaphors since to interpret means to unveil hidden meanings clothed by language. The chapter thus offers readings not only of opposing views of ecclesiastical garments—as ciphers for divine order and perfection in contrast to material imperfections that must be transcended—but also of dress as a means to style ways of reading.

The fourth chapter, arguably the most rewarding in its critical innovation, attends to the luxury adornments of Griselda’s sartorial transformations in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. Denny-Brown identifies the adverbial phrase, ‘in swich richesse,’ which modifies Griselda’s famous translation from peasant girl to marchioness, as an understudied image that marks a critical shift from Griselda’s own antimaterialism to the conspicuous consumption of the ‘arch wives’ featured in the Tale’s Envoy. She presents dress as a flexible signifier that announces an allegory of a virtuous soul, a commentary on the sartorial and spending excesses of bourgeois women, and the Clerk’s own excessive frugality in his crafting of plain poetry.

In contrast to Griselda, who typifies resolute patience in a world marked by material excess and change, the galaunt—the medieval precursor to the dandy and fop, and the focus of Chapter Five—represents the playful, profligate, and style-conscious man who transforms his attire with each wave of sartorial innovation. A similar contrast persists in terms of a literary aesthetic: where the Clerk mirrors Griselda’s material disengagement by refusing to adorn his poetry with unnecessary rhetorical devices and literary tropes, writers that feature galaunts in their poems delight in highly stylized poetics. The galaunt’s clothing does not signify social status, but rather exemplifies an aesthetic playfulness...