Common Threads: A Reappraisal of Medieval European Sumptuary Law

Abstract

in ThirTeenTh-cenTUry sPain, no one other than the king was legally permitted to wear a scarlet rain cape; in 1356, the city of Florence proclaimed it illegal for women to have buttons on their clothing without corresponding button holes; while in England in 1363, Parliament decreed that only knights and clerics with incomes above a certain amount were permitted to wear linen in the sum mer. 1 As puzzling as these restrictions may seem to the modern mind, they were profoundly meaningful to contemporaries, since sumptuary laws such as these were enacted in great numbers throughout Western Europe from the mid-thir teenth century on; there are more than three hundred examples from the Italian citystates alone. 2 Although scholarly interest in sumptuary law has increased in recent decades, the laws hold far more potential as a historical resource than has yet been real ized. To date, moreover, the various bodies of sumptuary law have been studied in geographic and temporal isolation from one another, rather than as a whole, as a large corpus with local variations. It is time to approach sumptuary law on a comparative basis, to allow internal similarities and differences to suggest new meanings and new avenues of research. 3