The modern publishing demand for illustrations to match text has a tendency to promote an inaccurate linking of literary passages from the high Middle Ages and images from the later Middle Ages. While the manuscript tradition clearly shows that many Old French texts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were read and copied into later centuries, it should not be ignored that the culture that produced them had its unique set of styles, trends, and social issues.
An example of the problems involved in taking chronological liberties is found in Christopher Breward’s The Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress. Breward justly critiques traditional costume history for focusing chiefly on physical form, construction, and visual representations of dress, and suggests that attention needs to be turned towards the “wider implications of what might be termed ‘the birth of modern fashion’ for structures of class and gender within society, or the broader cultural and economic implications of such a ‘naissance’.”117 In addressing this “birth,” however he begins by quoting John of Reading’s criticism of English court dress around 1340, saying that contemporaries perceived a “shift in fashionable dress away from the simple, functional style previously popular amongst the European nobility, towards a French-inspired emphasis on contour and cut.”118 He employs the findings of costume historians who “have identified the middle years of the fourteenth century as the first period of significant fashion change,” but this hypothesis is challenged by his own argument: if the English in 1340 were imitating an already-established French fashion for body-conscious cut, fashion must have already have existed previously, at least in France. While he carefully considers the problems inherent in extant medieval sources, in discussing England in the 1350s and 1360s he draws heavily on French and Occitan literary and documentary sources from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.119
In all, seven of his thirteen primary sources are French. This attests to the importance of the language of fashion in French and occitan sources from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries for any discussion of medieval european fashion. his book also demonstrates that to find detailed visual sources for illustrations, one must draw images from the fourteenth century or later. von Boehn’s Modes and Manners, like many other books and documentaries, similarly juxtaposes pictures from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with texts from the eleventh to the thirteenth. It is a general problem with histories of fashion, which suggests that a shift in methodology is in order. Stella Mary Newton’s Fashion in the Age of the Black Prince: A study of the years 13401365 stands in contrast as a model of carefully coordinated visual, textual, and documentary sources.120
Other scholars have dated fashion’s appearance in the fourteenth century based on other kinds of theories and texts. The sociologist Werner Sombart, believing that courts were the basis of the modern capitalist system, saw the birth of the “modern court,” and of consumerism and consumption, in Avignon (as well as in some of the Italian city-states) in the fourteenth century, based on accounts from Petrarch, Pope John XXII, and records of increased prostitution. He believed that women, specifically courtesans, were responsible for the advent of modern consumption and fashion practices. This view displays some of the gender prejudices that construe fashion as an exclusively feminine preoccupation. Sombart discounted the courts of the earlier Middle Ages because their notions of love were not sufficiently “secularized,”121 a view which suggests that he did not examine French and occitan vernacular texts, which are often very highly secularized.
World History
