Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and Fashioning Conduct in Late Medieval Literature by Nicole D. Smith (review)

Clerical vituperation against fashion in sermons, canons, and penitential manuals often strikes the modern reader as uncomfortably negative, perhaps because our economies are so inextricably tied to consumption that it is difficult to imagine that something so essential to global economic health could result in damnation. Some scholars of the intersections of medieval dress and literature have focused on the misogyny of sermon literature (E. Jane Burns, for example). Others have ignored clerical texts, implicitly treating the world of vernacular romance as belonging to a separate register (Monica Wright). In Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and Fashioning Conduct in Late Medieval Literature, Nicole D. Smith presents an extensive and erudite case for reading romance and corrective clerical texts together, at least for the four authors she profiles as “deeply interested in advancing a pedagogical curriculum that posits aristocratic attire as indicators of right and honorable behavior” (178). These authors—Marie de France, Heldris de Cornuälle, the Gawain-poet, and Geoffrey Chaucer—respond, she argues, to clerical denunciations of fine dress with “sartorial strategies” that worked to legitimize such dress when worn by virtuous characters, challenging “the widespread assumption that stylish individuals were in need of spiritual rehabilitation” (19). The narrow focus of the essays, which execute close readings of relatively brief passages examined in comparison with impressive quantities of contemporary clerical literature, speaks perhaps to the coming of age of literary studies of medieval clothing. Smith does not feel compelled to tell the whole story of medieval dress, nor to justify the topic as legitimate rather than frivolous. The length of the notes and bibliography (nearly half as long as the text itself, 85 pages for 181 pages of analysis) suggests the amount of attention already committed to these authors: these are well-trodden textual paths. This reader wonders what “strategies” Smith might discover further afield. In any case, the narrowness of the focus allows for convincing, if discrete, cases to be made.

In Chapter 1, “Marie de France: Guigemar and the Erotics of Tight Dress,” Smith presents Marie as a writer who throughout her attributed oeuvre showed interest in exploring intersections between courtly ethos and Christian conduct, turning away from Ovid’s ultimately cynical message in the Remedia amoris that love must be undone toward an argument to the contrary that love can be virtuous if it is “tightly bound” (“estreitement bendé” [26]). Whereas high medieval clerics such as Maurice de Sully and Gilles d’Orléans associated tight women’s dress and belting with spiritual jeopardy, Marie uses tight dress on Lanval’s otherworldly lady to signify truth as well as nobility and beauty. Guigemar binds its lovers in bonds of fidelity through the devices of his knotted shirt and her knotted belt, neither of which any intervening suitor can untie, signifying the protagonists’ commitment to erotic restraint.

Chapter 3 likewise studies a sort of belt, the jeweled girdle that Gawain accepts from Bertilak’s wife in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Smith reads Gawain’s transformation of the girdle into a penitential garment at the end of the poem in the light of “halters” worn by pilgrims and penitents, and also representations of the Virgin giving her girdle to Saint Thomas, showing how “the girdle articulates moral virtue at a time when such finery was believed by many to be spiritually dangerous” (135). The chosen verb there, “articulates,” demonstrates the subtlety and agility required in these readings: analogous to the articulated motion of an elbow or ankle, Smith takes discourses that seemingly go in crossed directions, and shows that they can be turned on their sinews and made continuous.

Chapter 2, “Telegraphing Morality through Transvestism,” applies this method to the thirteenth-century Roman de Silence. The romance begins with a framing discourse on avarice and admonitions for honor and generosity. The decision of Silence’s parents to raise their daughter as a...