Chaucer and Array Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Dressing the Warrior and the Streets of Athens in the Knight's Tale
- 2 Sartorial Signs in Troilus and Criseyde
- 3 Reading Griselda's Smocks in the Clerk's Tale
- 4 Reading Alison's Smock in the Miller's Tale
- 5 Costume Rhetoric for Sir Thopas, “knight auntrous”
- 6 Conclusion: Other Facets of Chaucer's Fabric and Costume Rhetoric
- Appendix A
- Appendices B
- Appendices C
- Appendices D
- Works Cited
- Index
- Chaucer Studies
1 - Dressing the Warrior and the Streets of Athens in the Knight's Tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of Illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Dressing the Warrior and the Streets of Athens in the Knight's Tale
- 2 Sartorial Signs in Troilus and Criseyde
- 3 Reading Griselda's Smocks in the Clerk's Tale
- 4 Reading Alison's Smock in the Miller's Tale
- 5 Costume Rhetoric for Sir Thopas, “knight auntrous”
- 6 Conclusion: Other Facets of Chaucer's Fabric and Costume Rhetoric
- Appendix A
- Appendices B
- Appendices C
- Appendices D
- Works Cited
- Index
- Chaucer Studies
Summary
Part I: Dressing the Warrior
Colorful, lavish dress is the hallmark of processional spectacles in the Middle Ages, according to accounts of processions in period chronicles, records, and secular romances. Although chronicle depictions of costume are never as detailed as present-day readers might wish, medieval romances often provide sumptuous details, and occasionally medieval records explain or testify to the accuracy of a portion of romance descriptions. Geoffrey Chaucer's romance, The Knight's Tale (KnT), both follows this tradition of costume depiction in its spectacular processions and deviates from it, simultaneously fulfilling and thwarting the audience's expectations of tales which we, now, would classify as within the genre of medieval romance.
Dressing the Major Characters
The description of Arcite's sumptuous funeral garments provides a case in point. In Chaucer's account, tearful Greeks carry Arcite's funeral bier in a manner that echoes funeral procession depictions in antique Athenian grave craters (see Fig. 1.1). His bier is covered in cloth of gold (I, lines 2870–73):
Theseus hath ysent
After a beere, and it al overspradde
With clooth of gold, the richeste that he hadde.
And of the same suyte he cladde Arcite …
In equally opulent garb, in Boccaccio's Teseida, Arcite's body is displayed in garments made of the finest purple fabric:
E acciò che Teseo intero segno
di nobil sangue desse di costui,
tutti vi fè gli ornamenti da regno
venir presenti, e adornarne lui;
li le veste purpuree, con ingegno
fatte, si videro addosso a colui … .
(Book 11, stanza 36)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Chaucer and ArrayPatterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and Other Works, pp. 14 - 53Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014