Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings (The New Middle Ages) 9781403961877, 9781137096753, 1403961875

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The New Middle Ages Bonnie Wheeler, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women's history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

Published By Palgrave • Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly

• Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies ofDiscourse by Robert S. Sturges

• The Ethics ofNature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio's Poetaphysics by Gregory B. Stone

• Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval European and Heian japanese Women Writers edited by Barbara Stevenson and Cynthia Ho

• Presence and Presentation: Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition by Sherry]. Mou • The Lost Love Letters ofHeloise and Abelard: Perceptions ofDialogue in Twelfth-Century France by Constant]. Mews • Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault by Philipp W Rosemann • For Her Good Estate: The Lift of Elizabeth de Burgh by Frances A. Underhill • Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl • Motherhood and Mothering in Anglo-Saxon England by Mary Dockray-Miller • Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman edited by Bonnie Wheeler • The Postcolonial Middle Ages edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

• Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages by Laurel Am tower • Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture edited by Stewart Gordon • Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose • Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages edited by Francesca Canade Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn • Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular Desires by Suzannah Biernoff • Listen, Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages edited by Constant]. Mews • Science, the Singular, and the Question ofTheology by Richard A. Lee, Jr.

• Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees • Malory's Marte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt • The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate BlumenfeldKosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren • Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350-1500 by Kathleen Kamerick • Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala • Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Effros • Representations ofEarly Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan • Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images edited by Desiree G. Koslin and Janet Snyder • Eleanor ofAquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons • Isabel La Cat6lica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff • Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses ofMale Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard Zeikowitz • Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225-1350 by Linda E. Mitchell

• Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to joan ofArc by Maud Burnett Mcinerney • The Persistence ofMedievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl • Capetian Women edited by Kathleen Nolan • joan ofArc and Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler • The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam • Charlemagne's Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters ofaDarkAge by Paul Edward Dutton • Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills • Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh • Sacred Place in Early Medieval Ncoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington • The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel • Chaucer's]obs by David R. Carlson • Medievalism and Oriental ism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim • Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska Roberts

Medieval Fabrications Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings

Edited by E. Jane Burns

pal grave macmillan

*

MEDIEVAL FABRICATIONS Copyright© E. Jane Burns, 2004 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-6186-0 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN IS THE GLOBAL ACADEMIC IMPRINT OF THE PALGRAVE MACMILLAN division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and ofPalgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

ISBN 978-1-4039-6187-7 ISBN 978-1-137-09675-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-09675-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Medieval fabrications : dress, textiles, clothwork, and other cultural imaginings I edited by E. Jane Burns p. em. --(The new Middle Ages) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Costume--History--Medieval, 500-1500. 2. Textile fabrics, Medieval. 3. Costume--Symbolic aspects--Europe. 4. Civilization, Medieval. I. Burns, E. Jane, 1948- II. New Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))

CT575.M435 2004 391" .009'02--dc22 2003067179 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by planettheo.com First edition: September 2004 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to Flora McFLimsey, who appreciated the pleasures ofclothes and the imagination.

I would like to extend special thanks to the founding editors of the Medieval Feminist Newsletter (now the Medieval Feminist Forum) Roberta L. Krueger and Elizabeth Robertson who agreed with me in 1985, during

an impromptu meeting at the Kalamazoo airport, to launch the newsletter and create an official forum for feminism within Medieval Studies. Thanks also to Thelma Fenster, who joined us as co-editor of the newsletter shortly thereafter, and to all those who have supported the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and kept medieval feminist studies alive over the years. Not least among those scholars is Nancy Jones whose important early work on the embroidery romances encouraged us all to begin thinking about textiles and clothwork in a more interdisciplinary frame. Thanks also to the wonderful students in my honors class on "Medieval Fabrications" in spring 2003 for their enthusiasm and invaluable insights. I thank my colleagues Judith M. Bennett and Barbara J. Harris and other members of theN orth Carolina Research Group on Medieval and Early Modern Women for their incisive comments on an earlier version of the Introduction to this volume. Thanks also to Brenda Palo, seamstress extraordinaire, for preparing the index. And, as always, extra-special thanks to Fred Burns and to Ned, this time for their enduring commitment to comfortable clothes. E.J. B. The editor and authors wish to acknowledge those who gave permission for use of images: In Kathryn Starkey's chapter, Photo Rifksdienst voor het Oudheidkundig Bodemonderzoek, Amersfoort, The Netherlands. In Janet Snyder's chapter, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (all rights reserved). In Andrea Denny-Brown's chapter, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.

Why Textiles Make a Difference ................................. 1 E. JANE BURNS

Text and Textile: Lydgate's Tapestry Poems ...................... 19 CLAIRE SPONSLER

Tristan Slippers: An Image of Adultery or a Symbol of Marriage? .................................. 35 KATHRYN STARKEY

Dressing and Undressing the Clergy: Rites of Ordination and Degradation ......................................... 55 DYANELLIOTT

Uncovering Griselda: Christine de Pizan, "une seule chemise," and the Clerical Tradition: Boccaccio, Petrarch, Philippe de Mezieres and the Menagier de Paris ....................... 71 ROBERTAL.KRUEGER

"This Skill in a Woman is By No Means to Be Despised": Weaving and the Gender Division of Labor in the Middle Ages ........................................ 89 RUTH MAZO KARRAS

Tucks and Darts: Adjusting Patterns to Fit Figures for Stained Glass Windows Around 1200 .................... 105 MADELINE H. CAVINESS

Limiting Yardage and Changes of Clothes: Sumptuary Legislation in Thirteenth-Century France, Languedoc, and Italy: .................................... 121 SARAH-GRACE HELLER

Material and Symbolic Gift Giving: Clothes in English and French Wills ........................ 137 KA THLEEI\ ASHLEY

Cloth from the Promised Land: Appropriated Islamic Tiraz in Twelfth-Century French Sculpture .................. 147 JANET SNYDER

Almeria Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary: Toward a "Material" History of the Medieval Mediterranean .................................. 165 SHARON KINOSHITA

How Philosophy Matters: Death, Sex, Clothes, and Boethius ....... 177 ANDREA DENNY-BROWN

Flayed Skin as objet a: Representation and Materiality in Guillaume de Deguileville's Pflerinage de vie humaine . .................................. 193 SARAH KAY

Notes ...................................................... 207 Works Cited ................................................ 252 Author Biographies .......................................... 273 Index ...................................................... 275

Why Textiles Make a Difference E. Jane Burns

ghe essays in this collection reveal the richness and importance of using dress, textiles, and cloth production as categories of analysis in medieval studies. Textiles and the representation of them in literary, historical, art historical, legal, and religious documents provide a particularly apt tool for medievalists of various disciplines because textiles stand at the nexus of the personal and the cultural, often linking specific, individual expressions to institutionalized and hierarchical social structures. The spectrum of possibilities raised by the study of medieval cloth and clothing in all their represented forms ranges widely from the use and circulation of garments as a mark of visible wealth, social position, or class status to the varied attempts by clerical and legal authorities to regulate gender and rank by controlling dress and ornamentation. The spectrum extends further into the production, distribution, care, use, and decoration of textiles themselves, often as forms of gendered labor. It also encompasses the cross-cultural and economic effects of trade and

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exchange offabrics through pilgrimage and crusade that brought Islamic and Byzantine traditions into the wardrobes of western Europe. This volume draws on an array of disciplines currently involved in examining the wide-ranging functions of dress and textiles in medieval culture, using the work of historians and art historians, literary and cultural critics. The geographic scope of individual contributions stretches from western Christian cultures in England, France, Occitania, Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries to the peoples of Muslim Spain and the Arabic-speaking Levant. Each essay analyzes some aspect of medieval culture through the lens of textiles, demonstrating how attention to material detail can spur us to rethink and expand the intellectual paradigms that structure our individual disciplines.

Feminism and Material Culture: Theorizing Objects Nothing in the title of this volume alludes to feminism or fashion, although both played a key role in the genesis of this project and its final framing. Indeed, recent theoretical reconceptualizations of the study of dress and textiles have drawn fashion studies into the realm of material culture, demonstrating the benefits to be derived from reading individual garments as highly charged and malleable cultural icons that define, describe, and productively create social bodies. 1 That fashion and feminism need not be at odds might surprise, since from the time of Simone de Beauvoir's apt denunciation of the myth of the eternal feminine, feminist critics have often dismissed fashion as a form of sexual display that fostered the objectification of women based on fantasies of male spectatorship. 2 As a result, questions of costume, attire, and adornment had long been left to archaeologists, costume historians, and museologists, whose work was to categorize, catalogue, and display objects without evaluating or accounting for troubling cultural conventions that might inhere in them. 3 More recently, however, scholars of material culture have questioned this artificial exclusion of fashionable objects from social theorizing, proposing instead that items of dress be considered important agents

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of cultural imaginations, both female and male. Clothes in this sense are seen as social sites that stage gendered identities at the intersection of individual fantasies, social regulation, and ethical concerns. Postmodern feminists have acknowledged the potentially subversive force that can be exerted by articles of clothing that function, in other circumstances, as tools of control and dominance. 4 Fashion theorists have insisted on examining the relation between material garments and visual and textual representations of them, understanding those representations to be objects in their own right, while also accounting for the representational functions of clothes. 5 Feminist film theorists have shifted the terms of the debate away from Freudian-derived voyeurism to emphasize female spectatorship and consumerism in regard to screen fashions and the potentially iconic function of costume independent of narrative strategies and conventions. 6 Transnational feminists have shown how material objects can undergo subtle but significant transformations of value and meaning as they are shifted from one cultural context to another. 7 No longer is fashion understood simply as unique to a culture of capitalism that generates a privileged phenomenon of European haute couture or as typifying modern individualism as an index of class, status,

wealth, and power, as early analysts of consumer culture Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen believed. 8 We have learned, for example, that in a psychoanalytic frame, the act of dressing can constitute a productive and meaningful invention of the individual. 9 We can now understand the material body as a privileged place of intersection between consciousness and the world, where clothes make a difference in terms of touch, texture, and movement, rather than derive their meaning from sight alone. 10 We can also see that the process of home dressmaking holds as many important cultural clues as museum displays of costly gowns. 11 Having embraced Roland Barthes' s semiological analysis of fashion as a representational system and Jean Baudrillard' s postmodern concept of a "symbolic economy" in which categories of objects "quite tyrannically induce categories of persons," studies of dress have begun to envision a wide range of interpretative possibilities for reading clothing and its complex circulation. Also key in the reassessment of clothes as cultural objects is

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Pierre Bourdieu' s concept of habitus, which explains how material objects, including architecture and space, can engage their users in acquiring cultural competency. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological reading of the "lived body" as a body situated in cultural spaces that dictate the range of possible modalities it can adopt has also shaped studies of dress and fashion. 12 By acknowledging the importance of the everyday, the significance of examining dress across a range of non-European cultures, the relevance of applying theory of various kinds to textiles and clothing, and the importance of recasting issues of consumption and distribution within an international frame, feminist analyses have, in turn, demonstrated the relevance of rethinking the body in terms of clothes. Perhaps most importantly, as feminist theorists of dress have turned toward studies of material culture, they have begun to understand, along with Arjun Appadurai, that consumer goods (in this instance clothing and adornments) can be "resocialized" and given new meaning by those who use them. 13 As Hildi Hendrickson explains, "When we see Africans using our products to create their identities-and vice versa-we learn that the meaning of body or commodity is not inherent but is in fact symbolically created and contested by both producers and consumers."14 Peter Corrigan explains further that clothing, as well as being an object to which things happen, can also "provoke things to happen." 15 It is in this sense that one can speak of dress, textiles, and clothwork as "cultural imaginings," as the title of this volume suggests, and can understand dress and textiles as more than consumer objects or products and cloth work as more than a form of labor. Rather, costume, fabric, and textile work can be seen to participate in a complex system of fabrications that move constantly between individual bodies and the social sphere, between material objects and various cultural representations of them, creating a relational dynamic perhaps best exemplified by the concept of an imaginaire vestimentaire (sartorial imaginary). Odile Blanc uses the term to describe the interface between clothing and cultural formations according to a range of imagined positions, so that items of dress are understood to negotiate in a variety of ways among individual desire, perception, and fantasy on the one hand, and cultural demands and conventions on the other. 16 From this perspective, we can

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understand clothing and textiles more generally as potentially active forces in social relations or as forms of material culture that "far from reflecting society ... can be seen to construct, maintain, control, and

transform social identities and relations," as Roberta Gilchrist has explained in another context. 17 These critical forays may help explain, in fact, why a number of earlier feminist theorists drew so consistently on metaphors of dress, textiles, sewing, knitting, and weaving in their efforts to defme and reconceptualize sexual difference or to expand the theoretical field of female subjectivity and agency. One thinks most immediately of Nancy Miller's call to envision a position from which feminists might speak in tropes while walking in sensible shoes, or Naomi Schor's observation that "women occupy in modem western culture a specific liminal cultural position which is through a tangled skein of mediations somehow connected to their anatomical difference, to their femaleness" (second italics mine). Similarly, Luce Irigaray offers a formulation of the feminine as "reduced to a mark, an inappropriate mask, an assigned garment." 18 Most recently, Iris Marion Young charts the possibility for a fluid and shifting female subjectivity centered around a constructed "homeplace" where "the activities of preservation give some enclosingfabric to this ever-changing subject by knitting together today and yesterday" (italics mine). 19 Even in the most

abstract feminist theorizing among psychoanalytic and literary critics, images of clothing and textiles provide a consistent reminder of the force of these material objects as key cultural icons for feminist thinking in the west. But what of medieval studies?

Medieval Studies and Clothing: What's in a Chemise? For a number of years, medieval scholars tended to focus on the material side of the issue. Historians carefully researched the details of wool, linen, and silk production, the techniques used to fashion garments and to decorate them with elaborate embroidery. 20 Economic historians in particular studied the trade and distribution of these fabrics and other decorative commodities within western Europe and between Europe

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and the eastern Mediterranean. 21 Costume historians provided taxonomies and inventories of elements of dress that appear on seals and other visual emblems, while medieval art historians sought information about dress and textiles in order to read garments figured in manuscript illuminations and in sculptural programs on cathedral facades. 22 More recently, literary scholars have become eager to better understand details of clothing and clothwork that appear in conduct books, didactic literature, and prescriptive legal codes. 23 A number of literary critics have scrutinized complex scenarios of cross-dressing and the varied functions of elaborate courtly attire 24 The ritual functions of vestments are especially crucial to scholars studying royal and religious garments, along with those investigating heraldry. 25 Four recent books attest to the wide-ranging uses of clothing as a category of analysis. Stewart Gordon's edited collection of essays, Robes and Honor: The Medieval World ofinvestiture, explains the significance of robing rituals for royal, ecclesi-

astical, and warrior figures from Central Asia through Persia, the Byzantine Empire and the Middle East, to the Medieval West. Janet Snyder and Desiree Koslin's edited volume, entitled Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, and Images, offers readings of

archaeological, art historical, and architectural objects along with analyses of legal, literary, religious, and historical documents and information about the technology of textile production. 26 Susan Crane's The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity during the Hundred Years War analyzes "the materiality of self presentation in dress and gesture"

as a kind of ritualized practice in the court cultures of England and France. 27 My own Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture argues that many of the most basic tenets of

courtly love in the French tradition can be challenged when we read them through the lens of clothing and textiles. Earlier, path-breaking work on the social implications of material culture was provided by Joachim Bumke' s Courtly Culture: Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages and Michel Pastoureau' s edited collection entitled Le Vetement: Histoire, archeologie, et symbolique vestimentaires au Moyen Age. 28 Increas-

ingly, over the past decade and a half, then, studies of medieval dress, textiles, and clothwork have opened the possibility of investigating

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medieval culture through a dual lens in which material culture and cultural imaginings cross in productive and surprising ways. From this perspective, clothes and other adornments become flexible cultural formations; their use and meaning extend far beyond the functions of practical cover, decorative adornment, or index of social status. One has only to consider the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, whom God clothed with skins to cover their naked flesh, to see how quickly material clothing is fashioned by the able hands of medieval commentators into metaphorical garments that resonate on a number of key cultural registers. In the case of Adam and Eve, animal skins are used to dress the first humans and mark their fall into flesh and clothes simultaneously. But these animal skins can readily be recast as suitable metaphorical clothing for the words of Scripture. In Augustine's view, animal skins provide a parchment cover or "veil of flesh" that conceals theW ord of God, literally recorded on another kind of skin: manuscript skins on which "the words and deeds of men, of which we read in those books, [are] rolled up and concealed in fleshly wrappings." These skins clothe not human flesh but a textual body of words. In the Confessions, Augustine develops the image further, refashioning the animal skins that "once did apparel men" into a divine garment that surprisingly covers nothing at all. Here the firmament itself is said to be a book stretched out like a skin without words, an ethereal book needing no interpretation and bearing little or no materiality, we are told: "Heaven shall be folded up like a book; and is even now stretched over us like a skin." 29 In this instance, there are no fleshly wrappings to remove before deriving

divine meaning. That meaning is overt and apparent on the skin itself. 30 We have moved, then, from material skins that cover naked bodies to parchment skins that physically wrap and conceal the word of God, to a third, even more complex, formation in which the garment-like skin and the body of words formerly covered by it have become strikingly one and the same. In the last instance, the ambiguously material skins of an immaterial firmament provide an uncanny kind of clothing through which surface has become substance. That a textile cover might merge with the object putatively covered is not limited to theological commentary. Analogous examples are

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attested by a number of medieval representations of clothing in which garments are tenuously positioned as equally material and symbolic. That paradoxicallocation attests to the strength, range, and flexibility of textiles, in their various forms and functions, as a productive category of analysis for those interested in studying the complexities of medieval cultural imaginings recorded in religious treatises, literary texts, historical garments and documents, and art historical representations. If we move from the theological example of Adam and Eve's animal skins into a secular context, we might consider the basic, everyday article ofmedieval clothing known as the chemise. A unisex undergarment made from linen that also functioned as a nightdress, the chemise can be used in literary texts to connote chastity, virtue, reduced social status, or even criminality for men, while often marking erotic availability, nudity, and sin for women. 31 The chemise appears at its most practical in Marie de France's "Guigemar,"

when the chivalric hero effectively staunches a serious wound by using the corner of his "chemise." 32 By contrast, that same garment provides material for the most abstract allegorizing in Chretien de Troyes' s twelfthcentury romance, Cliges, when the lovestruck protagonist, Alixandre, describes his painful amorous wound by invoking the standard image of an arrow lodged in the lover's heart. In this instance, however, the arrow is housed, we are told, in a quiver fashioned from the ladylove's chemise. If she is the arrow that has entered the desirous suitor's heart, their metaphorical coupling is not viscerally naked but highly abstract and appropriately" dressed." 33 This chemise is not a cloth garment to be put on, used, or removed. In fact, it is impossible to discern where this undergarment stops and the conjoined lovers' skin begins. One can cite historical and art historical examples of the chemise that carry similarly complex cultural meanings while also defying the assumed separation of body and clothes. We might consider, for example, the putatively preserved and legendary chemise of the French king Louis IX, a thirteenth-century garment now housed in the treasury of the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Made of linen and lacking the left sleeve, this historical chemise bears a fifteenth-century parchment inscription stitched onto its front panel that describes it as belonging to "Saint Louis, former king ofFrance." 34 Especially important in establish-

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ing the garment's status as a relic was its presumed proximity to the deceased king' s flesh, allowing this item of dress to function literally as a direct extension of the king' s material body. For pilgrims and Christian believers in the French Middle Ages, this chemise was considered to be materially as "real" as a preserved fingernail or leg might have been. 35 Saint Louis's undergarment is not then understood as a functional covering, fully separable from the former king's body. The common everyday chemise in this instance becomes an embodied item of dress, a garment that, like the veronica (a true icon) is both an image and an essence. 36 The chemise de Saint Louis is then neither a pure representation nor purely a material object, but both at once. Even more to the point, in an art historical context, we find representations of the Virgin's chemise that appear on small lead badges called chemisettes distributed to medieval pilgrims who visited the site of the

Virgin's holy tunic at Chartres cathedral. Although the cathedral's key relic is known today as the Virgin's veil, before 1712, when the reliquary was opened and its contents revealed, pilgrims to the site understood the reliquary to contain an especially potent chemise, the garment worn by the Virgin both when she conceived and gave birth to the Christ child. In fact, when the reliquary was opened in the eighteenth century, it is said to have contained no chemise at all, but five meters of cosdy silk fabric reputed to have come from Syria. 37 But medieval pilgrims did not know this. As visitors to Chartres sewed the small leaden chemisettes onto their hats or jackets, the Virgin's venerated tunic was not only copied in miniature and carried away by pious visitors. In this instance, when pilgrims affixed the metal badge representing the Virgin's chemise to an article of their own clothing, the image of a garment became in turn a material item of dress in its own right. Medieval pilgrims' bodies were literally clothed in a material representation of clothes. 38

Reading Clothes; Reading for Sartorial Bodies The foregoing examples of chemises drawn from very different disciplinary contexts, whether literary, historical, or art historical, do not

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conform readily to the conceptual models most often used to read clothed bodies in the Middle Ages or the contemporary moment. Most commonly, clothing is read as a cover, an artificially created envelope that conceals, to a greater or lesser degree, what is presumed to be a fleshy body beneath. This reading tends to privilege the natural body over its superficial cover. It is found in examples that range from the literary cultivation of chivalric disguise used to conceal a knight's "true" identity, to instances of crossdressing in literary and hagiographic accounts that conceal a protagonist's imputed "natural biology." The understanding of clothing as insubstantial cover extends to clerical denunciations of lavish clothing, jewelry, and even make-up as unnecessary adornments to be removed and summarily discarded. 39 A second conceptual model readily available for reading clothed bodies tends to privilege the cultural pole of the dyad, endowing clothes with the ability to generate public identity and create social status, as in the concept "clothes make the man" (or the woman, as the case may be). From this perspective, the visual effect of clothing can produce real material consequences for social interaction. Thus, medieval Jews, lepers, prostitutes, and criminals had to be clearly marked by garments that recorded their station in life. 40 Saracens could not wear clothes that might allow them to be confused with Franks, and the devil often appears represented in stripes. 41 A similar logic informs much medieval legislation that warns repeatedly against lesser nobles dressing above their assigned social station. 42 Their borrowed, usurped clothing could transform their bodies, visually at least, into something they were not previously. Although these two modes of reading clothing and textiles are staged in a range of medieval cultural documents, we also find a rich supply of examples more in line with instances of the chemise discussed above. These invocations of articles of dress encourage us to read clothing in a third way: as forging sartorial bodies derived equally from fabric and from flesh, bodies that erode the ostensible line between artifice and nature. 43 This is especially true of clothing in courtly literary texts where sartorial bodies often challenge the very distinction that separates fabric on the one hand from corporeal beings on the other, producing complex assignments of gender, desire, and class

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status, as I have argued elsewhere. 44 The foregoing examples of the medieval chemise help us to see the power of textiles and garments more generally to forge and participate in cultural meanings well beyond the functional, decorative, or identificatory, and to challenge traditional understandings of clothes as discreet objects, removable and distinctly separate from the wearer. The process is counterintuitive and conceptually challenging because we tend to see clothes and bodies, whether represented or historical, as fundamentally distinct, in line with the first two conceptual models outlined above. However, the varied functions of clothing in the textual, historical, and iconographic examples provided by the ladylove's chemise in the romance Cliges, Saint Louis's historical chemise, or the visual images of the virgin's chemise stamped onto pilgrim's badges all stage, in different ways, a dynamic relation between the terms "body" and "garment" that privileges neither surface nor substance. Here, forms of material culture such as clothes and representations of them can be active agents in constructing social bodies. 45 The chemises represented on badges displayed on pilgrims' clothing are neither primarily visual images nor merely decorative adornments. They do not appear initially to be body parts or garments in their own right but become a combination of both once they are worn. Saint Louis's recovered chemise is significant as having the status not of an everyday, functional

cover for the king's body but an uncanny part of it. The ladylove's allegorical chemise in Cliges provides a highly abstract, disembodied representation of courtly passion. But it does so to the extent that it clings closely to the heroine's fine skin. These garments (represented or actual) have become products of complex social interactions that produce sartorial bodies, which they mark and identify, but which they also help to create and fashion. Consider as a final example the Abbot Suger's comment that the stained glass windows at Saint-Denis contained vast amounts of "vitri vestiti et saphirorum materia." 46 Suger here draws on a metaphor of clothing to evoke, at one and the same time, the materiality of intensely colored pigments functioning as garments and the intangible clothing of the symbolic world they represent. Suger's characterization of the

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windows in the choir of the abbey church has been interpreted to mean at least two things, the first being that the pieces of glass contained in the windows were covered physically (vested) in multi-colored pigments much as garments cover the body. When Panofsky translates the phrase as "colored glass and sapphire glass," he explains further that the glass is not superficially painted but saturated with color. 47 Second, the abbot's description of his powerful windows has been taken to mean that the translucent panels were "vested with" sacred symbols that accompanied the materia saphirorum, or the jewel-like blue glass from which they are made. Von Simpson translates the phrase as "windows made of blue glass and invested with symbols." 48 Most significant for our purposes is that in both interpretations, the dressing is integral to the material ground of the windows, not separable from them. The metaphorical clothes adorning Suger's colored windows cannot be considered an inconsequential conspicuous cover to be removed, as medieval moralists would have women remove excessively lavish items of dress. Nor do these metaphorical clothes create a deceptive cover, effectively generating a false identity of the kind that sumptuary legislation seeks to regulate and restrain. Suger' s windows provide a particularly clear example of the way that metaphorical invocations of medieval clothing can expand and extend material objects or, in some cases, bodies, into the cultural sphere. Whether the glass panels in question are imbued with material color or are inherently garbed in symbolic meaning, that adornment carries a substantive rather than a superficial connotation and the vestments evoked are understood to be integral to the windows, not detachable from them. The dressing of these windows, in both interpretations cited above, relies on a paradoxical image of embodied garments, equally dependent for their meaning on material and symbolic frames of reference. It is well known that rhetoricians such as Geoffroy of Vinsauf allude similarly to poetic composition as a process of" clothing" the matter with words, embellishing and adorning the topic at hand with artifice that replaces the natural order of things with a more pleasing, and more substantial, arrangement of artful creation: "Let the art of poetry ... beware lest its head with shaggy hair, its body with tattered

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garments, or the least little detail displease." 49 However surprisingly, here artifice has a body. To be sure, this is not always the case. If words function in rhetorical treatises as necessary vestments, those same metaphorical clothes carry a deadly materiality in some theological contexts, as when the letter is said to kill rather than give life to divine meaning, weighing it down with too much tangible substance. 50 However broadly their potential symbolic and allegorical functions in other contexts, clothes are here returned to their status as physical properties of the material world, resembling the opaque skins covering Adam and Eve's nakedness rather than the immaterial skin of Augustine's firmament. Medieval representations of textiles across a broad spectrum of disciplines offer the full range of options, and much more.

Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries and Expanding Intellectual Paradigms The chapters that follow demonstrate varied ways in which the material components of dress, textiles, and clothwork can be used to discuss broad cultural issues: from questions of gender, class, and ethnicity to religious and political concerns; from aesthetic, rhetorical, and iconographic considerations to legal regulation and bequests; from questions of labor and production to processes of consumption and display or cross-cultural patterns of trade and exchange. In these instances, cloth, clothing, and textiles are not simply an indication of wealth and status, gender, or social identity. Nor do they function principally as a superficial cover indicating disguise or vainglorious consumption. These skins, garments, and fabrics provide, rather, points of access for reading cultural formations on a wider scale. As contributors to this volume explore objects and processes of material culture associated with cloth, clothing, and cloth production and the varied representations of them in verbal and visual form, the resultant essays help expand significantly the conceptual frames previously at our disposal for reading and interpreting various aspects of western medieval culture. They address the

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processes of poetic composition and dramatic performance, the substance of philosophical and religious allegory, the range and function of iconographic images and objects both religious and secular, and the parameters used for determining gendered labor. They redefine the limits of gift exchange, and reveal a surprising process offeminist editing. They broaden our understanding of the methods used to copy and transpose images in stained glass, the interplay between visual and verbal storytelling, the scope and particularity needed to redraw the map of sumptuary legislation or to adjust the lens we use to chart the European geo-cultural map. Some of the essays collected here are more overtly feminist than others. Some draw more heavily than others on theoretical material. But all open new ways of reading medieval cultural formations by examining those cultural structures through some aspect of textiles. Claire Sponsler's chapter, "Text and Textile: Lydgate's Tapestry Poems," shows how two-dimensional weavings commonly used as luxury household furnishings also existed as large scale historical tapestries displayed as part of three-dimensional public performances including words from poetic texts, visual display, and oral reading. A number of religious and secular poems by Lydgate, intended to be read alongside tapestries displayed for civic and religious ceremonies, help us understand how texts and textiles could operate together in the later Middle Ages in a performance context. Here words woven into tapestries interacted with words read aloud, and poetic fabricators like Lydgate could have fabrics in mind when composing poems. In Kathryn Starkey's chapter ("Tristan Slippers: An Image of Adultery or a Symbol of Marriage?"), public performance takes place literally on the feet of urban inhabitants of the Low Countries. Their surviving leather shoes depict an adulterous scene from the courtly romance ofTristan but with crucial variations that distinguish these sartorially based images from the iconographic tradition recorded in courtly manuscripts. By reading images of the Tristan story embossed on fifteenth-century leather shoes alongside Middle Dutch urban literature that emphasizes pragmatic and ethical concerns, Starkey shows how these visual representations of the courtly love story, worn in public on everyday shoes, have been altered

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to reflect not illicit sexual encounter but the more pragmatic concerns of an emerging discourse on middle class marriage. Dyan Elliott ("Dressing and Undressing the Clergy: Rites of Ordination and Degradation") charts a different process of resymbolization enacted through garments in the religious sphere. By shifting our focus from the long-standing official symbolism of liturgical vestments used to mark and maintain the ecclesiastical hierarchy of rank and orders to the ritual process of actually dressing and undressing priests, Elliott shows how items of male dress can chart a key change in the political climate of the thirteenth century. As the formal Church liturgy of undressing (degradation) publicly strips dissenters of clerical rank, it makes them vulnerable to possible execution. Roberta L. Krueger ("Uncovering Griselda: Christine de Pizan, 'une seule chemise,' and the Clerical Tradition") analyzes Christine de Pizan's syncopated rewriting of the Griselda story that deletes elaborate commentaries accompanying previous versions of the tale by Boccaccio, Petrarch, and two latemedieval French writers. Christine's pared-down tale dramatizes not the patience of a submissive wife emblematized in a simple shift and Griselda's changes of clothes, but the long-standing suffering of married women and the harsh realities of wife abuse. In '"This Skill in a Woman Is By No Means To Be Despised': Weaving and the Gender Division of Labor in the Middle Ages," Ruth Karras uses cultural representations of gendered work to supplement evidence provided by guild and tax records, showing that even after textile production becomes waged commercial work for men in England and France, cultural representations continue to associate women with weaving in the domestic sphere. Symbolically, weaving remains the appropriate and desirable province of married women in particular, whose very virtue is attested and recorded in household clothwork. Madeline Caviness takes us from the process of making cloth to the possible use of cloth patterns in making stained glass windows. "Tucks and Darts: Adjusting Patterns to Fit Figures for Stained Glass Windows Around 1200" shows how greater attention to the use of patterns in copying and adjusting images in stained glass windows in both England and France can suggest that some of those key patterns might have been

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made oflinen, which would allow subtle sizing adjustments to be made by means of sewing. Both janet Snyder ("Cloth from the Promised Land: Appropriated Islamic Tiraz in Twelfth-Century French Sculpture") and Sharon Kinoshita ("Almeria Silk and the French Feudal Imaginary: Toward a 'Material' History of the Medieval Mediterranean") turn our attention eastward, revealing the extent to which religious iconography of the Christian West maps complex cultural relations of exchange and trade with Islamic cultures of the eastern Mediterranean and Muslim Spain. Snyder shows how stone carvings in fine limestone on French cathedral facades from the 1130s to the1160s record delicate variations in the kinds of material fabrics represented and the specific techniques of embroidery used to decorate them. Carved representations of clothing in this context attest to the presence and use of imported Islamic textiles along with details of costume adapted from Islamic models that had become an inherent part of western, Christian dress. Looking at Muslim Spain, Kinoshita reads the traces oflslamic silks in Christian church treasuries and in vernacular French texts to reveal a concerted medieval fascination with the Almerian silk that links French aristocratic luxury taste to cloth production in the Iberian peninsula, Norman Sicily, and countries of the eastern Mediterranean. Reading through silk used in religious and secular contexts allows us, in this instance, to view the map of Latin Europe from a new perspective in which the Iberian peninsula and Norman Sicily become central points of commercial access and economic exchange with a richly hybrid Mediterranean culture. Sarah-Grace Heller and Kathleen Ashley broaden our understanding of the scope and function oflegal documents that regulate and record the use and exchange of clothing. Heller's detailed account of wideranging variations in sumptuary legislation in medieval Europe ("Limiting Yardage and Changes of Clothes: Sumptuary Legislation in Thirteenth-Century France, Languedoc, and Italy") helps us redraw the map ofEuropean sartorial regulation, emphasizing the importance of reading these legal codes as a complex language that was interpreted differently across varying social sectors and articulated with crucial geographic and site-specific variants. Kathleen Ashley's chapter on "Material and Sym-

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bolic Gift Giving: Clothes in English and French Wills" uses bequests of clothing in English and Burgundian wills to question and expand the limits of gift theory. Since these items of dress garner their most powerful meanings when the giver is in fact absent, they reconfigure the terms of dynamic interaction typically associated with both gift and commodity exchange, while inserting at the same time into the gift equation the important distinguishing feature of class status. The chapters by Andrea Denny-Brown and Sarah Kay alert us to the importance of accounting for the material aspects of highly abstract, allegorical texts, whether in the Latin or Old French literary traditions. In "How Philosophy Matters: Death, Sex, Clothes, and Boethius," Denny-Brown reads the allegorical figure of Philosophy in Boethius's Consolation ofPhilosophy against the stark materiality of her torn gown,

revealing that the very garment used to figure philosophical enlightenment, perfection, and purity of the male mind in this text also records the symbolic loss of philosophical knowledge. Associating philosophy and learning with a materiality that is explicitly feminine ultimately unsettles the allegorical project of representing the rarefied perfection of male philosophical thought. Kay's chapter on "Flayed Skin as objet a: Representation and Materiality in Guillaume de Deguileville' s Pelerinage de vie humanine" brings us full circle to the animal skins invoked by

Augustine in the example with which we began, but with a significant twist. Drawing on Zizek's dialectical-materialist theory of representation, Kay shows how Deguileville's fourteenth-century trilogy of religious poems uses images of flayed skin and their association with parchment and ecclesiastical writings as a guarantor of sublime immortality, while also using those same skins to represent the desublimated materiality of the mortal body. In both Boethius and Deguileville, according to these readings, the substance of allegorical writing is more dependent on aspects of materiality than we had previously thought. Taken together, the essays in this volume chart a broad expanse of medieval cultural imaginings that carry textiles, dress, and clothworkfar beyond their common association with functional covering, unnecessary adornment or artificial disguise, on the one hand, and beyond their accepted role as visible markers of class, gender, or social station, on the

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other. Engaging with these important features of dress and textiles as they are represented in literary, legal, art historical, and historical sources, including texts in Latin and in regional vernaculars across a wide geographical spectrum, the chapters in this book urge us to think about dress and fabric in new ways. Some chapters reveal how textiles play a key role in bourgeois and aristocratic gift giving, how they feature in stained glass window construction, how they inflect poetic performance and allegorical storytelling, or how they inform narratives of wifely virtue, gendered labor, and middle class marriage. Other chapters show how medieval concerns with dress generate a highly site-specific language of legal regulation, how they can produce a process of feminist editing, chart the political rise and fall of clergy, or tie the medieval west to Muslim Spain and the eastern Mediterranean. Using textual and visual representations of textiles, clothing, and cloth production as a lens through which to view these varied cultural formations, individual contributions to Medieval Fabrications suggest a number of ways in which scholarly attention to both material and imaginative aspects of medieval fabric can productively expand the conceptual frameworks and disciplinary practices of Medieval Studies.

Text and Textile: Lydgate"'s Tapestry Poems Claire Sponsler

j

n 1910, Eleanor Hammond remarked that the relationship in

medieval culture between poetry and the decorative arts-and especially between tapestry and poetry-awaited a full historical examination.1 Nearly a century later, we're still waiting. In the case of tapestry's ties to verse, we might expect that etymology alone would have been a spur to investigation, given the common Latin roots (in textus and

textura) for the vernacular terms for the making of stories and the making of cloth. Or that mythology, with its legend of Philomela, her tongue having been cut out, told her story through the medium of weaving, would have incited inquiry, especially given the story's popularity throughout medieval Europe. Or, more compellingly, that the empirical evidence itself would have urged analysis. For although medieval tapestries have not survived in great numbers, not surprisingly given the essential fragility of textiles, enough did (and enough others are mentioned in accounts and records) to allow us to consider their implications

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as a specific kind of representational medium. Textile historians have, of course, written extensively about medieval tapestries, but not from the angle of their links to the narrative arts. Yet what is immediately apparent about many medieval tapestries is how often they reveal a propensity not only for using decorated cloth to present narratives but also, and more strikingly, for treating writing as a component of the pictorial display. Words were woven into tapestries (or painted onto cloth) to provide a commentary on the images; words were also woven around tapestries as oral accompaniment to the visual display, as

occurred in courtly and civic ceremonies. As a partial response to Hammond's wish that a full historic examination be undertaken, this essay will investigate that intersection of text and textile, as revealed in the work of the fifteenth-century English poet John Lydgate. Lydgate, a monk of the great Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds and a prolific writer of religious and secular verse, provides us with a large number of examples of poetry intended to accompany visual displays, including wall paintings and wall hangings. Lydgate's tapestry poems, to use the term Hammond gave them, point to the various material shapes a text could take, whether it be writing, pictorial image, or performance. Tapestry poems confront us with an insistent blurring of representational forms that leaves us wondering what difference, if any, it made that a story was read from a manuscript page or viewed on a wall hanging or listened to in a performance; such mixing of forms urges us to reassess the modern preference for sorting texts out into discrete representational modes when they originally inhabited two or more at once. An examination ofLydgate's tapestry poems reveals, then, not only fabric's important cultural role as a means of disseminating narratives but also its connection to other media of representation. If our modern privileging of the written word has often led us to overlook the importance of visual media in the formation of a late-medieval literary consciousness, the example of Lydgate ought to remind us of the basic fluidity of cultural forms within which even an author as enamored of the written word and as in thrall to the idea of literary genius as Lydgate created his works. Marginalized though they have been within his oeuvre and within the

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canon of Middle English literature, perhaps we should grant Lydgate' s tapestry poems a more central place, as texts that by vividly demonstrating the importance of fabric for the work of literary fabrication reveal literature's deep ties to the visual and performative arts oflate medieval culture. Tapestries were among the most popular luxury goods of late medieval Europe and in less lavish form were part of everyday decoration and household furnishings, as is attested by frequent mentions in wills of bequests of tapestry or arras bedcloths. They were also an important art form, particularly in the hundred or so years from 1350 to near the end of the fifteenth century. Although tapestries had been produced in Europe in earlier centuries, large-scale tapestry production began in the fourteenth century in areas already known for weaving, most notably Paris and Arras, whose names became synonymous with woven figurative fabric. In the second half of the fourteenth century, tapestry grew more artistically and commercially important and its use increased in the courts of Europe. Many of these tapestries depicted scenes from secular or religious history, often organized into a narrative. Among the amply-proportioned historical tapestries of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, which were probably used for civic or religious ceremonies, are the famous Nine Worthies wall hanging now in the Cloisters in New York; the Battle of Roosbeek (no longer extant) made for and celebrating the part played by Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in the defeat of Flemish rebels in 1382; and the Jousts of St Denis (no longer extant) commissioned by Charles VI (1397). 2 While

the cost of woven tapestries limited their purchase to the wealthiest of patrons until the production boom of the late fifteenth century lowered prices (along with aesthetic quality), painted or "stained" cloths, offered a less expensive format for the depiction of images and narratives. A will from 1429, for example, bequeaths to the "chapel of oure lady ... a steyned clooth with the salutacion of oure lady ther to abide perpetuelly," while a reference from around 1449 comments: "Here in this steyned clooth, King Herri leieth a sege to Harflew." 3 As Charles Kightly' s discussion of wall hangings in medieval York suggests, textiles could be a source of household ornamentation, a marker of social

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status, and an opportunity for entertainment, given their typical preference for depicting narrative. 4 How people might have "read" woven stories is suggested by an episode in Caxton's version of the romance Blanchardyn and Eglantine (ca. 1489). In chapter two, Blanchardine, walking in his father's palace with his tutor, gazes at the "hangings ofTapestrie and Arras" on the wall. The romance describes how, "stedfastly pervsing the abstracts & deuises in the hangings," Blanchardine asked his tutor "what warlike seidge and slaughter of men that might be." So taken was he by his tutor's reply, which recounted the history of the war and the heroic feats performed by its participants, that Blanchardine himself aspired to the same honors with the result that he "continually practised, both in action and in reading, the imitation of those valorous warres; neither thought he any time so wel bestowed as either in reciting, reading, or conferring of those warres." 5 While tapestries could offer legible texts well suited to spurring action and reflection alike, as the Blanchardyn example suggests, not all of them required an extra textual commentator like Blanchardine' s tutor to supply the missing verbal component to explain the visual depiction. A number of tapestries in fact included a written text as a constitutive feature of the design. As Hammond pointed out, it is not uncommon in surviving tapestries to see verses woven into the fabric, although it is difficult to say how widespread this phenomenon was since relatively few tapestries or painted cloths have survived. Citing evidence from the inventories of Charles VI of France and Henry V of England, Hammond notes frequent references to wall-hangings

apersonnages that describe

pictures of people accompanied by writing (apparently, often their names): One tapestry, for instance is described as one that includes writing beneath its depictions of people, as well as their names ("ou il y a au dessoubz desdits personnages ecriptures et leur noms escripz);" another tapestry of many other people ("plusieurs autres personnages") contains "au dessoubz de elles a grans escriptures;" and yet another that contains many inscriptions ("plusieurs escripteaulx") is mentioned. The inventory of tapestries owned by Henry V cites the opening phrase of the story ("estorie") on each tapestry, for instance: "Vessi amour

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sovient," "Cest ystorie fait remembraunce de noble Vierge Plesance," "Vessi Dames de noble affaire," and "Vessi une turnement comenser." Although it is impossible to know whether these phrases formed part of the tapestries themselves or are, as appears more likely, shorthand ways of describing the scenes depicted therein, such phrases emphasize the narrative aspect of the tapestries. 6 Other evidence of words actually woven into or painted onto wall hangings can be found in the January miniature of the Tres Riches Heures, which depicts a banquet in an aristocratic household; on the wall behind the banqueting table hangs an expensively decorated tapestry that is perhaps an illustration of a tapestry that once belonged to Jean, Due de Berry, and that includes written verses above scenes of battle. The sixpiece Angers Apocalypse tapestries originally had panels below each scene with an inscription; the inscriptions are now lost, but probably consisted of excerpts either from the text of Revelations or from a commentary on it. The tapestries of the Romance ofJourdain de Blaye (from the early fifteenth century) include inscriptions in a Picardy dialect. And a St. George tapestry described in the inventory ofThomas, Duke of Gloucester, as "Une pece d' Arras d' or de St. George," is said to "comense en 1' escripture des lettres d' or 'Geaus estAgles' ovec les armes de Monsr de Gloucestr" (it begins, in other words, with an inscription in letters of gold and the arms of Gloucester). 7 The example of Colart de La on, a French painter whose life spanned the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, suggests how an artist might have shaped a career around providing visual representations on fabric for ceremonial uses. Colart is first mentioned in 1377, in the employ ofPhilip the Bold, Duke ofBurgundy. Most ofColart's commissions appear to have been related to royal festivities and consisted primarily of painting banners and jousting implements. He was employed for the elaborate entry oflsabeau of Bavaria into Paris (1389) and prepared ceremonial trappings in connection with the marriage of John, eldest son of Duke Philip the Bold, in Cambrai. In December 1395 Colart was paid by Duke Philip's chamberlain for "grands tableaux," whose subject matter unfortunately went unmentioned. In 1396, Colart executed "un tableau de bois qui fait ciel et dossier," which included

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images of the Virgin, St. John and the Trinity, for a chapel endowed by Louis of Orleans in the church of the Celestines in Paris. The following year, he supplied a panel with Saints Louis of France and Louis of Toulouse for the room of the Dauphin Charles. In 1400 he provided four large, painted cartoons for tapestries ordered by the queen and in 1406 agreed to complete a "tableau" intended to be given as a gift from Jean de la Cloche to the Paris Parlement. 8 If Colart shows us a visual artist's involvement with fabrication, Lydgate offers a nearly contemporary look at a verbal stylist's corresponding role. Among the large body of work Lydga te produced-most of it for royal, aristocratic or wealthy bourgeois patrons-are a number of poems designed to accompany pictorial representations of one sort or another-whether statues, wall hangings, tableaux, or frescoes. Although none of the accompanying pictures has survived, so far as we are aware, internal clues within the poems themselves point to their connection with images as do annotations supplied by the scribe John Shirley, who was responsible for copying and thus preserving many of Lydgate's works. Several ofLydgate's religious works were apparently intended to be read along with visual images. Cristes Passioun, for example, ends by sending his poem ("Go, lytel bylle") to "Hang affore Iesu" in the hopes that "folk that shal the see" will read "this compleynt" (1:216-221, 113-116). 9 The Dolerous Pyte ofCrystes Passioun, which begins,

"erly on morwe, and toward nyght also, I First and last, looke on this ffygure" (1:250-52, 1-2) and ends by stating that saying a Pater-noster, Ave, and Creed while kneeling before this "dolorous pite" will earn pardons (51-56), similarly suggests that the poem was intended to accompany a visual image (a "pite," or pieta) displayed in some public place, presumably a church. The Image of our Lady begins with a similar command to "Beholde and se this glorious fygure, I Whiche Sent Luke of our lady lyvynge I After her lyknes made in picture" (1:290-91, 1-3), a picture that is later identified as resembling a painting in the church of Santa Maria de Populo in Rome. The last stanza of On De Profundis claims that the verses were compiled at the request ofWilliam Curteys (abbot of Bury) so that he would be able "At his chirche to hang it on the wal" (1:77-84, 167-68).

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Some ofLydgate's secular poems were also apparently written to go with visual representations, judging by internal hints and by headnotes provided by the scribe John Shirley, who was responsible for copying and thus preserving and disseminating many of Lydgate's shorter works, including those that had a performance context. Of the Sodein Fal of Princes (2:660-61) contains phrases (e.g., "Beholde