Abstract
In the thirteenth century, the “via Francigena” passed through the merchant cities of central Italy towards Provence and France. On it, silks moved north through Italian hands, while woolens made their way south and east.1 The trading cities of Languedoc and Provence cultivated niches in the market, dealing in wool, silk, and cloth of gold.2 Stories and songs were also exchanged, as the troubadours’ cansos were imitated and compiled by the French and Italians, and French romances were reworked in Italian dialects, and parodied in Occitan hands.3 The French enjoyed a certain cultural hegemony in the later thirteenth century,4 when Brunetto Latini depicted himself as an Italian in exile writing his Livre dou Tresor in French in part because “la parleure est plus delitable et plus commune a tous langages (the language is more delightful and more commonly used than all others).”5
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Notes
Francisque Xavier Michel, Recherches sur le commerce, la fabrication, et l’usage des étoffes de soie, d’or et d’argent, 2 vols. (Paris: Crapelet, 1852–54);
E. M. Carus-Wilson, “The Woolen Industry,” in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, ed. M. Postan and E. E. Rich (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 614–92;
John H. Munro, “The Medieval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendor,” in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe, ed. N. B. Harte and K. G. Ponting (London: Heineman, 1983), 13–70.
Dominique Cardon, La Draperie au Moyen Age: Essor d’une grande industrie européenne (Paris: CNRS, 1999);
Kathryn Reyerson, “Medieval Silks in Montpellier: The Silk Market ca. 1250–1350,” Journal of European Economic History 11 (1982): 117–40.
Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon, 1953), pp. 30–34;
on Occitan parodies, Caroline A. Jewers, Chivalric Fiction and the History of the Novel (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 2000), esp. pp. 54–129.
Kevin Brownlee, “The Practice of Cultural Authority: Italian Responses to French Cultural Dominance in Il Tesoretto, Il Fiore and the Commedia,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 33. 3 (1997): 258–69.
Francis J. Carmody ed., Li Livres dou Tresor de Brunetto Latini, vol. 22, Publications in Modern Philology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948), p. 18. Translations are mine throughout.
Most influential is Henri Baudrillart, Histoire du luxe privé et public depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours, 2nd ed. (Paris: Hachette, 1881).
See also L’abbé de Vertot, Mémoire sur l’établissement des lois somptuaires (Paris: Académie des inscriptions, 1766);
Marcel Gatineau, Le luxe et les lois somptuaires (Caen: E. Lanier, 1900);
Etienne Giraudias, Etude historique sur les lois somptuaires (Poitiers: Société française d’imprimerie et de librairie, 1910);
Marthe Lériget, Des lois et impôts somptuaires (Montpellier: L’Abeille, 1919);
Pierre Kraemer-Raine, Le luxe et les lois somptuaires au moyen âge (Paris: Ernest Sagot, 1920), and others below.
Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
Also Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)
and Neithard Bulst, “La législation somptuaire d’Amadée VIII,” in Amadée VIII-Félix V, premier duc de Savoie et pape, 1383–1451 (Lausanne: Bibliothèque historique vaudoise, 1992), pp. 191–200.
Diane Owen Hughes, “Sumptuary Laws and Social Relations in Renaissance Italy” in Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 69–100, and “Regulating Women’s Fashion,” in A History of Women: Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 136–58;
Ronald E. Rainey “Dressing Down the Dressed Up: Reproving Feminine Attire in Renaissance Florence,” in Renaissance Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr., ed. John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto (New York: Italica Press, 1991), pp. 217–37, and his dissertation, “Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence” (Columbia University, 1985);
James Brundage, “Sumptuary Laws and Prostitution in Late Medieval Italy,” Journal of Medieval History 13 (1987): 343–55;
Stanley Chojnacki, “The Power of Love: Wives and Husbands in Late Medieval Venice,” in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 126–48.
Besides many of the studies cited above, Frances Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England, vol. 44, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926);
Kent Roberts Greenfield, “Sumptuary Law in Nürnberg: A Study in Paternal Government,” Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Sciences 36.2 (1918): 1–139;
John Martin Vincent, Costume and Conduct in Laws of Basel, Bern and Zurich, 1370–1800 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935);Johanna B. Moyer, “Sumptuary Law in Ancien Régime France, 1229–1806” (Ph.D. thesis, Syracuse University, 1996).
As Catherine Kovesi Killerby and Ronald Rainey note, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3–5, and Rainey, “Sumptuary Legislation in Renaissance Florence,” p. 16.
The Second Council of Nicaea, 787, exhorted clerics to dress modestly and to avoid showy apparel embroidered with silk. At the Second Lateran Council in 1139, bishops and clerics were told to avoid styles and colors which might interfere with their role as spiritual examples, H.J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder, 1937), pp. 151, 199–200. Pope Innocent Ill’s legate to Paris in 1203 prohibited sleeved cloaks, silk in colors other than blue or black, and other “inordinate” garments, Odette Pontal, ed. and trans., Les Statuts de Paris et le synodal de l’ouest (XIIIe siècle) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1971), pp. 74, 82, 84. Lateran IV continued this trend;
see esp. canon 16, Raymonde Foreville, Latrati I, II, III et IV (Paris: Editions de l’Orante, 1965), pp. 290, 355–56.
H. Platelle, “Le Problème du scandale: Les Nouvelles Modes masculines aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 53.4 (1975): 1071–96.
F. Niccolai, Contributo allo studio dei più antichi brevi della campagna genovese (Milan: A. Guiffré, 1939), pp. 125–26.
Alexander Cartellieri, Philipp II. August. König von Frankreich, band II. Der Kreuzzug (1187–1191) (Leipzig: Dyksche Buchandlung, 1906), p. 57;
Hans Claude Hamilton, ed., Historia rerum anglicarum Willelmi Parvi de Newburgh, in agro eboracensi, 2 vols. (London: English Historical Society, 1856), vol. 1, p. 276.
H. Leclercq, ed., Histoire des conciles, vol. 5 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1913), pp. 1171–72;
Ariodante Fabretti, “Statuti e ordinamenti suntuarii intorno al vestire degli uomini e delle donne in Perugia dall’anno 1266 al 1536,” Memorie della Reale Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, serie scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 38 (1888): 153–54. Fabretti also credits the growth to reawakened interest in Roman law.
H. Duplès-Augier, “Ordonnance somptuaire inédite de Philippe le Hardi,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 3.5 (1854): 176–81;
Gustavo de Matos Sequeira, “Le costume défendu,” in Actes du 1er Congrès international d’histoire de costume, 1952 (Venice: 1955), pp. 64–68.
G. Del Giudice, “Una legge suntuaria inedita del 1290: Commento storico-critico,” Atti dell’accademia pontaniana 16.2 (1886): 84–86.
Eugène Martin-Chabot, ed., La Chanson de la croisade albigeoise (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1989).
La Société archéologique de Montpellier, Thalamus Parvus, Le Petit Thalamus de Montpellier (Montpellier: Jean Martel Ainé, 1840), pp. 144–46.
Mentioned in François Boucher, 20,000 Years of Fashion (New York: Abrams, 1987), p. 179, who dates them at 1274 and 1291, without citation. Annie Lafforgue, ed., Inventaire des titres et documens de l’Hostel de Ville de la cité royale de Montauban (Montauban: Les Amis des Archives de Tarn-et-Garonne, 1983) lists “reglementz sur les habits des hommes et des femmes” for 1275 in the book of “Sermens,” p. 44. The document has apparently not been published.
Charles Giraud, Essai sur l’histoire de droit français, (Paris: Videcoq, 1846), pp. 205–6;
Leah Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 16, 67.
François Bousgarbiès, Du luxe féminin: de quelques uns de ses problèmes et quelques uns de ses conséquences en droit (Toulouse: G. Mollat, 1914), p. 140.
Jules Quicherat, Histoire de costume en France (Paris: Hachette, 1877), pp. 186–87.
Linda M. Paterson, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100–c. 1300 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–8.
Jacqueline Caille, “Urban Expansion in Languedoc from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century: The Example of Narbonne and Montpellier,” in Urban and Rural Communities in Medieval France: Provence and Languedoc, 1000–1500, ed. Kathryn Reyerson and John Drendel (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 67–68.
Curzio Mazzi, “Alcune leggi suntuarie senesi,” Archivio storico italiano ser. 4.5 (1880): 134–36.
Angelica Rieger, Trobairitz: Der Beitrag der Frau in der altokzitanischen höfischen Lyrik. Edition des Gesamtkorpus (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1991), pp. 691–95.
E.Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 59–62, 75–77.
Felix Lecoy, ed., Le Roman de la Rose, 3 vols. (Paris: H. Champion, 1965–70). For readings of the poem with regard to sumptuary laws, see Sarah-Grace Heller, “Fashioning a Woman: The Vernacular Pygmalion in the Roman de la Rose,” Medievalia et Humanistica 27 (2000): 1–18, and “Light as Glamour: The Luminescent Ideal of Beauty in the Roman de la Rose,” Speculum 76 (2001): 934–59;
Suzanne Méjean-Thiolier and Marie-Françoise Notz-Grob, eds., Nouvelles courtoises occitanes et françaises (Paris: Libraire Générale Française, 1997), pp. 354–83.
Richard Pogue Harrison, “The Bare Essential: The Landscape of Il Fiore,” in Rethinking the Romance of the Rose, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), pp. 289–303.
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Heller, SG. (2004). Limiting Yardage and Changes of Clothes. In: Burns, E.J. (eds) Medieval Fabrications. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09675-3_8
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