Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles, c. 450-1450

Chaucer's Reeve describes the entrance of the miller Symkyn and his wife into church on a holy day as a “sighte.” Why is Symkyn's wife in a red dress, and why does the Reeve consider it a spectacle? To answer these questions, this article examines Chaucer's use of the term sighte in the Canterbury Tales, the nature of fashion codes during the later Middle Ages, and what the choice of wearing a red dress says about an individual in a late medieval English village. Using Pierre Bourdieu's notion of distinction or taste, this article shows that the Reeve's description of Symkyn's wife in a red dress is one of the earliest renditions of tastelessness in English-language literature.

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Clad in flesch and Blood: The Sartorial Body and Female Self-Fashioning in The Book of Margery Kempe

Lucas

2019

The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures

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This article examines how the engagement with textiles and textile-craft in The Book of Margery Kempe facilitates the performance of Margery's female religious identity.Drawing on the fundamental precepts of performance theory, the article responds to recent scholarly interest in the manifestations of material devotional culture and the performative body. It first maps out the charged theological significations of textiles and their subsequent transformative potential. Then, it examines how Margery finds an active tool in "fabrics of devotion" in the form of saintly relics, images, and garments themselves, and how Margery's adoption of white garb refashions her body in the image

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Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles, c. 450-1450

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Vital Property in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

Vital Property in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

Dressing Symkyn's Wife: Chaucer's Reeve's Tale and Bad Taste

Clad in flesch and Blood: The Sartorial Body and Female Self-Fashioning in The Book of Margery Kempe

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Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles, c. 450-1450

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Vital Property in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

Vital Property in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

Dressing Symkyn's Wife: Chaucer's Reeve's Tale and Bad Taste

&#x93;Clad in flesch and Blood&#x94;: The Sartorial Body and Female Self-Fashioning in The Book of Margery Kempe

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

Clad in flesch and Blood: The Sartorial Body and Female Self-Fashioning in The Book of Margery Kempe