Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200-1500 (review)

Reviews 241 Parergon 20.1 (2003) propaganda purposes (p. 138-39). It is rather that what Knapp calls Hoccleve’s ‘figural hagiography’ (p. 146) is at odds with the psychoanalytic fort-da game which the argument drifts into for no real reason (p. 144-45). The final chapter, ‘“Ful bukkissh is his brayn:” Writing, Madness and Bureaucratic Culture in the Series’ (1419-21), returns Knapp to the trajectory of his first illuminating and provocative argument. This chapter offers a conceptualisation of writing as communynge and thus a revision of textuality that must be instrumental in Knapp’s rereading of Hoccleve’s works. This chapter comes closest to offering that theory of language as performative and historical, both before and after the fact, that is implied by Knapp’s reading of Hoccleve as bureaucrat/poet, text as document/poem. Hoccleve is at home in the habitus he has made of the Privy Seal. In his ‘Afterword,’ Knapp comments on the distance between Weber’s notion of bureaucracy as ‘the force of rationalisation’ and the theatricality of Balzac’s imaginary bureaucracy as ‘demimonde’ (p. 184). His project has been to position Hoccleve as ‘an early chapter in the genealogy of bureaucratic culture … tied to its opposite, the confident and self-aggrandising visions of courtly literature’ (p. 186). Glancing at an always already parthenogenic literary history, Knapp suggests that ‘Skelton, Pepys and even Kafka’ may turn out to be recognisable as part of the same culture. This challenge extends not only to literary history but also to ‘the bureaucratic muse’ ‘herself’. Jenna Mead School of English, Journalism and European Languages University of Tasmania Kovesi Killerby, Catherine, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford Historical Monographs), Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2002; cloth; pp. 191; RRP US$65.00; ISBN 0199247935. In Bologna in 1276 it was forbidden for women at funerals to cry out, tear their clothes, or in any way abandon themselves to grief. In Aquila in 1375, grieving male relatives were permitted to remain unshaven and grow a beard, but for no more than 10 days. Florentine regulations on wedding festivities in 1330 limited courses served at banquets to three, ‘to restrain riots and ambitions of the throat’, while the Lucchese in 1362 were more concerned to prevent any person of any status during a betrothal ceremony from punching the fiancé in the head, hitting 242 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) him with anything else, or doing ‘any other indecent thing’ to him. Fifteenthcentury Perugians and residents of Treviso were not to give lavish gifts to newborn babies, while knights undergoing investiture in 1330 Florence were prevented from offering any gifts to jesters or buffoons. Catherine Kovesi Killerby’s important and elegantly-written study of the later medieval Italian sumptuary laws – the most thorough account to date – offers illumination into these and hundreds of other such restrictions on behaviour and consumption, and provides the important reminder that while the great majority of Italian sumptuary laws dealt with clothing, dress was not their sine qua non. Excessive expenditure (whether on food, gifts, household furnishings or clothing) was a key concern of the legislators, but ultimately all the laws were ‘concerned with various manifestations of excess and, in particular, with excess in the consumption of luxury goods’ (p. 2). Control of funerary rituals and so on, just like regulation of attire, helped governments to maintain control over citizens’ ambitions and patterns of association. One recurring theme of the book is that ‘no [Italian] government in this period regarded luxury as an evil in itself’. Rather ‘it was the context of its use, by whom and for what purpose, that determined the approval or censure of luxury’ (p. 7). By the late thirteenth century many European governments, but Italian ones more than others, were coming to the now familiar belief that consumption was good for stimulating production, trade, employment and economic growth, and the increasing number of wealthy groups in the population were glad to spend lavishly. Such proto-modern trends were countered by conservative concerns about the vices of pride, avarice and lechery, the evils of social mobility, and (worst of all) women’s public display of their charms. Sumptuary laws attempted to negotiate the...