Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture by E. Jane Burns (review)

REVIEWS 212 concerns. Randall Ingram provides an essay considering addresses to readers of books of epigrams, and Kathleen Lynch examines the various ways of binding The Temple by George Herbert. She concludes that bookbinding’s marginalized position in the study of the book conceals important information, such as the relationship between the book trade and its customers, and, in this case, traces of the broader history of devotional literature. With this transition to the business of producing the book, we begin part III, “Print, Publishing, and Public Opinion,” whose four chapters each examine a different aspect of responses to publishing by readers and by writers. Michael Mendle looks at pamphlet collecting, which he suggests was an established habit in the seventeenth century, and seeks to promote a broader definition of book. Sabrina A. Baron then looks at the fears of and reactions to the power of reading that were expressed by John Milton in his reflections on licensing books for press, concluding that Milton was not for the deregulation of printing, but rather for the deregulation of reading. Taking a more strictly linguistic turn, Lana Cable examines the survival of at least inward nonconformism in the case Samuel Parker made for the removal of metaphor from ecclesiastical language. Finally, Anna Battigelli examines the case of John Dryden’s furious readers, locating their anger in response to his use of irony and consideration of written works as ephemeral rather than permanent, which excited irritation through his insistence on forcing new ways of reading. Concluding with this entry into newer multivalent ways of reading, the collection of essays concludes with an afterword by Stephen Orgel, who ties together the examples presented and speculates about further questions and applications of studying the book as an object, reminding readers “that books are not simply what is printed in them,” but also what their contemporary readers make of them. REBECCA KUGLITSCH, Comparative Literature, UCLA E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2002) 326 pp. Tales of courtly love, pining ladies, and noble knights seem like familiar subjects to many. However, E. Jane Burns’s new book is an invigorating reassessment of the French literature of the High Middle Ages through the discourse of the dress and luxury adornments of court men and women. In her analysis, Burns realizes that clothes are less a visible show of wealth and public status as set definers of identity, and more subversive tools for challenging social class, rank, and even shifting the categories of gender. She describes a kind of sartorial body, defined by both flesh and fabric, a social body defined by clothing at the same time that it reshapes the seemingly set definitions those very clothes are traditionally thought to represent. It is an active body, constantly defining and redefining itself. Burns presents her case in a very straightforward manner, and each chapter is dense with close readings and interpretations of numerous twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts, including Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. At the heart of her of work, is a desire to attribute to the women of these stories, a greater sense of agency and movement through the social ranks for women. REVIEWS 213 In the first part, Burns defines the stakes, the material importance of clothes as currency and signifiers of wealth, and the condemnations of these extravagances by the church, a theme that reappears and is discussed throughout the book. She examines the increased independence and social mobility of bourgeois women in encounters through the wearing of courtly clothes above their actual status. Women used love as a bartering chip for finer clothes from amorous suitors, allowing them to continually ascend to a higher social circle and rank, only to repeat the process of courting men for finer and finer adornments. Laws regulating the boundaries of proper dress reveal an anxiety between those who appear to afford that wealth signified by their clothing and those who truly do. Definitions of rank and gender were constantly transformed and remade, and class boundaries transgressed. Since the coining of the phrase “courtly love” by Gaston Paris in 1883...