The Corporeality of Clothing in Medieval Literature

Sarah Brazil

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9783110626643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Every known society wears some form of clothing. It is central to how we experience our bodies and how we understand the sociocultural dimensions of our embodiment. It is also central to how we understand works of literature. In this innovative study, Brazil demonstrates how medieval writers use clothing to direct readers' and spectators' awareness to forms of embodiment. Offering insights into how poetic works, plays, and devotional treatises target readers' kinesic intelligence—their ability to understand movements and gestures—Brazil demonstrates the theological implications of clothing, often evinced by how garments limit or facilitate the movements and postures of bodies in narratives. By bringing recent studies in the field of embodied cognition to bear on narrated and dramatized interactions between dress and body, this book offers new methodological tools to the study of clothing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Clothing and the Fallen Body
• 2 Graveclothes and Resurrection: From Gospel to Stage
• 3 Coming Forth, Still Bound: Raising Lazarus in Theology and Performance
• 4 Metaphorical Shoes and the Body
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index