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

In Sartorial Strategies: Outfitting Aristocrats and Fashioning Conduct in Late Medieval Literature, Nicole D. Smith examines four literary texts: Marie de France’s twelfth-century lai ‘Guigemar,’ Heldris de Cornuäille’s thirteenth-century Roman de Silence, the anonymous fourteenth-century Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, arguing that they all stage aristocratic garments as signs of virtuous behavior. Despite a long tradition of clerical commentary that denounces lavish garments as immoral, these literary texts use clothing, Smith explains, to signal behavior that is ‘virtuous and consonant with Christian teaching in the later Middle Ages.’ The very clothing that is often condemned as vainglorious, seductive, dangerous and corrupting can denote and even promote ‘appropriate ways of being,’ or what Smith terms virtuous ‘conduct’ or ‘comportment’ (4). In this sense Smith reads each of the poems she treats as engaging in a ‘pedagogical enterprise,’ offering ‘didactic lessons’ (8) to laity and clergy alike.

Reading historical shifts in pastoral care alongside shifts in fashion by focusing on two emblematic types of medieval fashion: tightly laced bodices, especially for women, in the twelfth century and closely tailored jackets for men in the fourteenth. Smith takes careful stock of the historical milieu and codicological context of each work, drawing on penitentials and other clerical accounts, along with medieval rhetorical treatises, to argue that a conversation about upright behavior takes place across a number of texts and genres.

The argument works best for the English texts, which are in fact from the later Middle Ages, as the book’s title indicates. The Gawain-poet, Smith explains, reveals the tensions evoked when ornate fineries are showcased in a Christian aristocratic milieu (95). As the Gawain-poet negotiates the generic demands of romance and the spiritual concerns of penance, the girdle functions as a penitential hair shirt, reconciling the individual with God and the Christian community. Smith reads the girdle, then, not as the result of Gawain’s actions but as a prompt to action that encourages the moral improvement of the entire community. As a vehicle for spiritual rehabilitation, the girdle transforms the pride of Arthur’s court into honorable virtue.

Smith explains further that Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, which provides the first vernacular penitential guide compiled by a layman in England, draws on the imagery of courtly fashion popular in romance narratives as part of the tale’s innovative understanding of orthodox spiritual bliss. In fact, Smith explains, the Parson’s nuanced sartorial strategy deploys aristocratic dress metaphorically to convey pleasure during an exposition of penance. Ultimately, the Parson shows that pleasure-in-dress is available to penitents who clothe themselves appropriately in virtue (175).

The two French texts, Marie’s lai ‘Guigemar’ and the Roman de Silence date from the High Middle Ages when Old French romance in both verse and prose was at its height. Readers trained in the French tradition will be surprised to hear the lais described as ‘contributing to religious writings on moral edification in the twelfth century’ (57), given Marie’s highly enigmatic Prologue, notorious for eluding any precise reading of its overt claim to ‘remedy vice.’ Smith takes Marie’s borrowing from clerical discourse at face value, going so far as to suggest that the lais function somewhat like penitential manuals: ‘the Prologue proposes a curriculum for understanding literary representations in an orthodox manner that would, in turn help readers guard themselves from sin’ (27). By associating tightly fitted and knotted attire with meritorious behavior, ‘Guigemar’ encourages readers to shun vice in favor of virtue.

Smith reads the Roman de Silence in relation to reforms advanced by the Fourth Lateran Council regarding vice and virtue, arguing that Heldris de Cornuäille stages a transvestite knight as a morally upright female protagonist who finds success at the King of England’s court despite her cross-dressing...