Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature by E. Jane Burns (review)

REVIEWS 236 tives. To build this consensus, many inconvenient elements of the narrative, particularly the shameful actions of the bishops, were purposefully forgotten, a strategy that Ebbo employed when confessing to his own involvement in the events. De Jong and Booker explore similar events and texts and react to the same historiography, but it is their differing approaches and audiences that create two unique monographs and interpretations of the penance of Louis the Pious. De Jong provides a straight-forward survey of the major events and texts of the 820s and 830s that will engage the Carolingian expert while providing an approachable introduction for the non-specialist or teaching. By contrast, Booker does not focus on the events or rituals of 830s, but rather on how the Carolingian texts and later reassemblies of these accounts have created powerful memories of Louis the Pious and the Carolingian dynasty. Any reader of both books however will come away with a complex and nuanced understanding of the events of the 833 and the importance of Louis the Pious’ reign. SARAH WHITTEN, History, UCLA E. Jane Burns, Sea of Silk: A Textile Geography of Women’s Work in Medieval French Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2009) 256 pp., ill. E. Jane Burns is an established feminist scholar whose contribution to the study of medieval dress goes far beyond inventorying the medieval female wardrobe. With her previous publications, Burns has mapped her approach to the analysis of social and cultural identity of medieval women. Burns “listens” to the voices of these women, as they speak through Old French texts written largely by men. In her analysis, however, Burns pays special attention to the subversive ways in which women established authority and gained agency using their own bodies, and the garments that clothed them, as their main tools. In Sea of Silk, Burns builds upon her earlier research in Courtly Love Undressed , where she focused on silk clothing as a marker of elite Mediterranean identity. Burns immediately warns that Sea of Silk “makes no claim to provide original historical or art historical research. Its contribution lies rather in bringing together the work of economic historians, textile historians, and art historians as a means of reading representations of material culture, specifically representations of silk and silk work, in Old French literary texts” (3). Thus, this new book shifts the focus from the women dressed in silk, to those women who “worked” the silk—namely, those who associated with silk and silk fabrics by producing, trading, wearing, and displaying it. In doing so, Burns reads medieval texts with an eye for local and Saracen women engaged with silk in France, Byzantium, Asia, and the Muslim world. Burns brilliantly aligns her work with the most current investigations, at a time when “interdisciplinary work” and the “Mediterranean world” are key phrases in medieval studies. At first, the connection to the Mediterranean seems far-fetched in a study based on Old French texts. But the author convincingly makes the case that these texts comment on women from home and abroad, who are familiar and exotic, home bound and mobile. Consequently, a cultural geography of silk emerges from the texts, mapping a world in which women from distant locations came together through their relationship to silk and silk fabrics. Read REVIEWS 237 from this perspective, many Old French texts gain trans-Mediterranean significance . On both sides of the Mediterranean, women who “worked” the silk gained social mobility and exposure, even though this mobility remained metaphorical for the most part. Furthermore, Burns’s approach to medieval texts reveals that the silk geography captured there bridged ideological, ethnic, and religious divides so strongly emphasized in other sources. Texts dealing with silk, then, captured the Christians’ fascination with, and appreciation of, Saracen silk work, even when Saracens themselves were looked upon as the dangerous other. The French elite constructed a persona based upon the marvelous eastern silks traded from Constantinople, Alexandria, Damascus, and Baghdad. In that context, silks denoted power, proclaimed status, and enhanced a man’s success. Even when women were lavishly dressed in silk, they were in fact displaying their fathers’ or husbands’ wealth and prestige. In contrast, according to Burns, by...