Women of lesser stations could be associated with cointe adornment and behavior, suggesting a broadening of accessibility to thirteenth-century fashion as described in criterion 10. However, when such women are linked to cointerie it is often less to demonstrate their personal qualities than to portray them as desirable objects. In the Roman de Troie, Jason and his companions admire the bourgeois women of the fortified city Jaconides, who were cointes and beautiful (line 1158). These women represent the riches of the city coveted by the adventurers, rather than individual characters to be developed.
In the second part of the Rose, bourgeois cointerie becomes the site of serious gender conflict through Ami’s discussion of the manners of a jealous husband, the Mal Marie, which illustrates the term’s link to criterion 8 for a fashion system, the arousal of criticism. This character laments the day he married an elegant, well-dressed woman. In so doing, however, he admits that he was seduced by the attraction of her stylish appearance.
Mieuz me venist ester alez pendre le jor que je dui fame prendre, quant si cointe fame acointai. morz sui quant fame si cointe ai.255
Would that I had been hanged
On the day I had to go and take a wife,
When I met such a cointe woman.
This cointe woman is the death of me.
This passage shows that cointises are a double-edged sword for women. Initially, they proved a successful method for finding a husband. once the husband is caught, however, it becomes an issue provoking his rage, frustration, avarice and jealousy.256
Couched in a larger discussion condemning marriage and women’s lack of chastity by quoting authorities like Juvenal and Abelard, the Mal Marie’s discourse reveals several insecurities with regard to women’s concern for their appearance. Cointerie is at the heart of his rage: he uses a form of the word five times in fifty lines. He sees women as employing the artifices of cointise in order to gain public attention and recognition, which is precisely how fashion functions. His suspicions, however, are that women cultivate their appearances only in order to attract sexual attention, making themselves cointe to pay homage to Venus, wearing their finery to dances and churches (lines 89959004). This speech shows the presence of several important criteria for fashion, beyond the criticism already mentioned (criterion 8). First, there is the logic of theatricality, which requires public performance of appearance for the functioning of a fashion system (criterion 6). The husband’s enumeration of the places where women (and men) go to be seen satisfies this. Second, the logic of seduction is functioning in the passage, that line of thinking that says that the love and affection of potential sexual partners may be gained through the consumption and display of fashionable objects and behaviors (criterion 9). The angry, misogynist tone of this discourse suggests that fashion was entirely the responsibility of women. A closer look, however, suggests that the husband is thoroughly implicated in the system. Its performance and seduction were elective on him. His wife expressed aspects of herself through her finery that appealed to him enough that he wanted to marry her. Once married, however, he wants that expression to cease and to gain control of her expressiveness.
His impotent rage suggests that some women were not willing to relinquish the expressive power of fashion once married, or at least that some men feared as much.
At one point, the husband admits that men indulge in cointises as well as women. after arguing that women insult God’s handiwork by altering it with artifice (lines 9009-32), he says,
Sanz faille ausinc est il des homes.
Se nous, por plus biaus estre, fomes les chapelez et les cointises seur les biautez que Dex a mises en nous, vers lui mout mesprenons quant a paiez ne nous tenons des biautez qu’il nous a donees seur toutes creatures nees.257
The same is, without fail, true of men.
If we, in order to be better looking, put floral wreaths and cointises over the beauties which God placed in us, we do him a great wrong by not appreciating the beauties which he gave to us over all other creatures.
In the quantity of space and words devoted to women’s fashion in this part of the poem, it would be easy to lose sight of men’s equal devotion to fashion. The rage-obsessed Mal Marie’s pause in his ranting to admit that men’s cointerie was just as much a problem as women’s testifies that men’s interest in fashion was just as significant as women’s, if not implicitly greater. It does seems to have elicited less protest, but one could generalize that women had fewer places for publicly criticizing men than men had for women.258
The wife’s cointerie is blamed for the man’s sexual frustration, both because cointerie seems to him to make her less submissive, and because her complicated clothing blocks his access to her body (lines 8824-34).
Que me vaut ceste cointerie, ceste robe couteuse et chiere qui si vos fet haucier la chiere, qui tant me grieve et atrahine, tant est longue et tant vos trahine, por quoi tant d’orgeuill demenez que j’en deviegn tout forsenez?259
What use is this cointerie to me,
This costly and expensive robe
Which makes you hold your head up so high,
Which vexes and torments me so,
Which is so long and trails behind you,
Which makes you act so proud
That it drives me quite out of my mind?
One of things that he most resents is the pride and self-confidence which her fine apparel grants her, and which she maintains despite his ranting and abuse. This meets criterion 4, in which fashion links stylish display and personal confidence. The subtle distinction between cointerie and pride insisted upon earlier in the poem by the god of Love breaks down here in the boorish husband’s unsubtle view. The husband’s excessive transports of rage, like the rabidly misogynist romances studied by Roberta Krueger, convey the impression of his own inadequacy as much as if not more than they convince readers of the true baseness of women or cointerie or contribute to the denigration of either.260 His loathing of her care for her appearance harms himself, by his own account, as much as it does her. When Ami finishes the story, he says that the jealous husband is a negative exemplum and that women should be allowed their freedom, not subjected to a man’s will (lines 9391-412). Nonetheless, the story of the Mal Marie occupies many hundred lines of vivid vituperation. It may be, as Krueger suggests of other misogynist texts, that this section was developed at such length because it provoked a lively reaction among readers. The narrator’s plea not to defame his writing for what he repeats from other authors about feminine behavior (lines 15165-212) supports the interpretation that Jean de Meun was being deliberately provocative with the aim of exciting interest. The degree to which he expounds on the gender relations surrounding cointerie suggests that it was in reality a matter fraught with tension as well as fascination.
The cost of cointerie
While fashion and consumption were on the rise in this period, income levels of various ranks were not always proportionate to the grades of social hierarchy. It is understandable that fashion became the focus of serious conflict, both economic and emotional. after being sexually thwarted by the volume and intricacy of his wife’s clothing, the Mal Marie is further made impotent by his frustration at his inability to seize control of the wealth tied up in his wife’s apparel (lines 8845-54). As Burns has observed, the wife’s finery leverages marital independence and social mobility for her.261 Women’s economic autonomy was limited to governing personal property like clothing, jewels, bedding and serving ware. Such things composed many dowries as well as the contents of women’s testaments.262
The husband who would lord over his wife sought to control her sexual freedom, her public appearance, her personal confidence and her wealth, all of which related to her cointerie. Nowhere in the Rose does a female figure attempt to control all of those powers in a male figure through discourse related to appearance. The meretricious Old Woman attempts to wrest some economic control from her lovers by manipulating them into supporting her taste for gifts, but she clearly occupies an inferior position in the social hierarchy and seems only a minor exception proving the rule. Judging by law codes, the paucity of female authors, and other factors, it is generally agreed that women had few modes of self-expression in the Middle Ages. Fashion was one of the few, as Jane Burns demonstrates in Courtly Love Undressed. Men struggling with their own sense of adequacy appear to have protested women’s right to participate in the fashion system. Fashion succeeded in remaining an outlet of selfexpression open to women, despite misogynist protests and other less gender-based moralizing like the arguments against artifice and in favor of God’s natural simplicity.
The purchases of finery described by the Mal Marie certainly stimulated the economy. A sense of the need to maintain appearances in order to retain or increase status was probably another guarantee of fashion’s successful foothold, creating a self-sustaining system. Medieval women may not have left the traces of their subjectivity that men did, but the signs of the growth of a fashion system indicate that, like men, they were able to express themselves through choices concerning appearance. Fashionable self-expression had considerable importance in determining suitable sexual and conjugal partners, the place of a couple in the social hierarchy, and personal self-esteem as well.
World History
