(original subject line: Book)
I’d just like to
recommend a fairly new book (2002). “Courtly love undressed. Reading through
clothes in Medieval Fench culture” by E. Jane Burns.
It is not a book on
dress history but a book on how dress can be “read” to see how dress is used to “negotiate desire,
sexuality and symbolic space as
well as social class” She also argues that “gender is often configured along a
sartorial continuum” rather than
being fixed in the two froms male and female. She has a constructivist approach to gender and uses
modern feminist theory, but it is
not really a difficult book. Although there are some minor faults on facts (like that the knights wore
their shields slung around their
necks during battle) but this does not affect her overall argumentation, which I find both interesting
and sound.
~ Eva Andersson
Message #949, March 24, 2003