‘Go humbly dressed as befits servants of God’: Alcuin, clerical identity, and sartorial anxieties

Abstract

Employing clothing as a means to investigate the letters of Alcuin (d. 804) reveals not only his great interest in dress as a subject for moral instruction but also ways in which the clothing and textiles of his time shaped Alcuin's discussion of attire. Alcuin perceived garments as both powerful tools and moral dangers with material consequences, particularly in his letters to Anglo‐Saxon correspondents. His epistolary corpus demonstrates sartorial tensions in a period that witnessed changes to clerical dress, increased concern to demarcate clerical from lay, and broader use of silk both in Anglo‐Saxon England and Carolingian Francia.

The identification of persons in Frankish Europe

“…27 Better for assassins and conquerors to remove heads that contained distinctive signs of identity. 35 There was also a certain fondness for scarring the body to seal the flesh record of who someone was, just as it was a scar on a thigh that alerted the old servant, Euryclea, that her long-lost master Odysseus had returned home. 29 Magnulf, the bishop of Toulouse, told Gundovald: 'You assert that you are the son of King Clothar, but we do not know whether or not that is true.'…”

“…There was an early medieval vestimentary code that doubtless meant more to them than it has to us, who can not now see it and too often fail to imagine it by reclothing our subjects. 35 There was also a certain fondness for scarring the body to seal the flesh record of who someone was, just as it was a scar on a thigh that alerted the old servant, Euryclea, that her long-lost master Odysseus had returned home. 36 The question of whether the shearing of a Merovingian royal was a brutal skull-scraping or a gentle haircut might push us to the former in that a bloody shearing not only removed royal hair, but marked the physical head as sheared by force.…”