In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Brueghel's Heavy Dancers: Transgressive Clothing, Class, and Culture in the Late Middle Ages
  • Nicole D. Smith
John Block Friedman. Brueghel's Heavy Dancers: Transgressive Clothing, Class, and Culture in the Late Middle Ages. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2010. Pp. xxv, 361. $45.00.

Many recent scholarly monographs on representations of clothing in medieval literature have examined the intersection between aristocratic attire and courtly identities. John Block Friedman's study contributes to this critical conversation by shifting its focus to depictions of peasant dress and behaviors. The scope of the book is admirable in its breadth. [End Page 340] Drawing from northern French lyric pastourelles, their bergerie variants, Spanish serranillas, antipeasant German satires, two of Chaucer's fabliaux, and the portrait of the Squire's Yeoman in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Brueghel's Heavy Dancers surveys what Friedman finds to be the “realistic treatment” of “clothing, accessories, and even related behaviors that formed part of the bourgeois and aristocratic views of rustics” (xiv). Such careful attention to rustic dress ultimately reveals, according to Friedman, bourgeois anxiety about peasants encroaching on urban social space.

Brueghel's Heavy Dancers takes the artist's Peasant Dance and Wedding Dance as points of departure for a study in medieval clothing, class, and culture. For Friedman, these sixteenth-century paintings featuring offensive sartorial and sexual behaviors observed by a solitary bourgeois figure emblematize upper-class discomfort with lower-class deportment that also appears in a variety of late medieval literature. Chapters 1 and 2 consider the pastourelle and its subgenre, the bergerie, as two forms that convey one of the book's central ideas: that a peasant's excessive sexuality as represented through dress or behavior could threaten noble status.

Where the first two chapters demonstrate that protagonists in the pastourelles wear dress inappropriate to social status, Chapter 3 considers clothing along with other forms of transgression, namely, physical ugliness and the inverted sexual roles of mountain women in Iberian serranillas by Juan Ruiz (ca. 1298–1350), Iñigo López de Mondoza, Marqués de Santillana (1398–1458), and Carvajal (fl. 1457–60). In a lengthy section on the rhetorical trope, effictio, Friedman presents head-to-toe descriptions of ugliness in Iberian poetry as influenced by poetic conventions of unattractive women in French and Italian literature. The conclusions reached in this chapter repeat those of the earlier ones: Spanish poets, like their French counterparts, dress their female protagonists in “transgressive” courtly attire so as to indicate peasant desire for social advancement while simultaneously appealing to an elite readership curious about rustic life. Strangely absent, given Friedman's assertions, is evidence of the circulation of the poetic works or mention of manuscript contexts, which might address the ways in which medieval readers experienced this literature.

Chapter 4 examines German variants of the pastourelle as a bridge between the French form and the English fabliaux of Chaucer. Building upon scholarship that positions German antipeasant satires as some of the most gross and comic representations of rural excesses, Friedman [End Page 341] focuses less on dress than on physical ugliness, a woman's desire to dominate her male suitor, and sexual insatiability in the works of late medieval German writers Neidhart (fl. 1215–40), Oswald von Wolkenstein (1377–1455), and Hermann von Sachsenheim (1366–1458). These writers provide examples of “peasant and female transgressivity not seen in the romance-language poems” (133).

Chapters 5 and 6 turn to “villagers” in Chaucer's fabliaux and the General Prologue. Reading against Helen Cooper's reminder that Chaucer portrays individuals rather than groups in the General Prologue, Friedman finds Chaucer describing “a social milieu that more or less corresponded to the way such people actually lived during the poet's lifetime” (171). In Chapter 5, “Chaucer's Miller and Alison,” realism correlates so closely with “transgressivity” that it becomes an expression of it: “Surely the more threatening and antihierarchical a character is, the more concretely—realistically—that character will be portrayed” (171). Friedman then treats the pilgrim Miller, and Symkin, the corrupt Miller of The Reeve's Tale, as interchangeable figures: “Both characters are halves of the same ‘village portrait,’” a point that Friedman believes Chaucerians...

pdf

Share