Sumptuary Legislation Research Articles

Sumptuary Laws, Gender, and Public Dressing in Early Modern Genoa

Abstract This article explores sumptuary legislation and its enforcement in early modern Genoa. Whereas the sumptuary laws from other early modern Italian city-states partitioned society by social rank, profession, or citizenship, the laws in effect in late sixteenth-century Genoa divided the population only into men and women. Genoa therefore represents a key site for exploring gender difference through dress and adornment. Adopting a gendered, sociological, and material culture framework, this article demonstrates how sumptuary laws informed understandings of gender and gendered practices of dressing. It takes as its point of departure a ledger of sumptuary denouncements for the year 1594, and examines how Genoa’s citizens adhered to, or transgressed the gendered expectations set out by the city’s legislative structures. It argues that while prescriptions for idealized masculine and feminine comportment coloured the content and wording of the law, in daily life a spectrum of gendered identities could be enacted through clothing. This article thus advances discourse on the impact of sumptuary laws on understandings of gender in early modern Italy, and the ways in which masculine and feminine identifications were negotiated through and in dialogue with clothing.

The Political Economy of Status Competition: Sumptuary Laws in Preindustrial Europe

Sumptuary laws that regulated clothing based on social status were an important part of the political economy of premodern states. We introduce a model that captures the notion that consumption by ordinary citizens poses a status threat to ruling elites. Our model predicts a non-monotonic effect of income—sumptuary legislation initially increases with income, but then falls as income increases further. The initial rise is more likely for states with less extractive institutions, whose ruling elites face a greater status threat from the rising commercial class. We test these predictions using a new dataset of country and city-level sumptuary laws.It is unfortunately an established fact that both men and womenfolk have, in utterly irresponsible manner, driven extravagance in dress and new styles to such shameful and wanton extremes that the different classes are barely to be known apart. —Nuremberg Ordnance of 1657, Quoted in Hunt (1996)

‘They have always worn Spanish clothes’: Indigenous elites and sumptuary legislation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century New Spain

ABSTRACT Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Indigenous communities in colonial Mexico experienced discriminatory sumptuary laws. Following colonization, Indigenous elites sought to assert their status, in part, through material means. Drawing on over 500 legal complaints, this article argues that licenses for Spanish clothes, weapons, and accessories formed an important part of the broader framework used by Indigenous elites to solidify their standing within the colonial regime. While ceremonial items like heraldic arms and genealogies legitimized Indigenous families, garments served to establish such individuals on an everyday basis. Petitioners did not request access to ritualistic pre-Columbian garb, but rather, focused exclusively on European daily attire. At the same time, required legal clauses embedded in the licenses offer important windows into the evolving opinions of officials on garments, identity, and socio-racial standing. Although authorities approved all existing licenses, stipulations sought to increasingly restrict native access to items perceived as European. Sumptuary laws thus created an important zone of contestation where Indigenous individuals fought to assert their nobility amidst shifting socio-political climates.

Vestire a modo altrui: Dal sumptus medioevale al luxus d’età moderna tra diritto e morale by Cecilia Natalini

Reviewed by: Vestire a modo altrui: Dal sumptus medioevale al luxus d’età moderna tra diritto e morale by Cecilia Natalini Maureen C. Miller Vestire a modo altrui: Dal sumptus medioevale al luxus d’età moderna tra diritto e morale. By Cecilia Natalini. (Naples: Editoriale Scientifica. 2020. Pp. x, 218. €14,00. ISBN 978-88-9391-709-4.) This book primarily addresses students and historians of law, but any historian using or citing sumptuary legislation may profit from reading it. Although it offers [End Page 781] a highly particular (and questionable) genealogy of legal thought on northern Italian urban statutes limiting ostentatious display—chiefly targeting women’s clothing, but also extending to public displays of mourning and marital alliances—this study usefully excavates some moral logics underpinning such legislation and aspects of their political influence on conceptions of the state. The author, jurist and legal historian Cecilia Natalini, opens with a critique of contemporary historiographical emphasis on the ineffectiveness of this sumptuary legislation. Casting it as reductionistically rooted in eighteenth-century German scholarship theorizing state power, Natalini proposes reconsidering this legislation from the perspective of its medieval communal origins in admonishing, rather than commanding, individuals to do good. She poses two questions. First, when and why did the question of sumptus (cost, expense) become, in reality, a question of luxus (excess or extravagance)? This necessitates considering the position of the Christian church on luxus: was it always synonymous with sin? Second, what is the relationship between Christian morality, individual liberty, and public discipline that centuries of ius commune judicial experience bequeathed to modern jurisprudence? In brief, she argues that theologians did not treat luxus as synonymous with sin and that debates about sumptus really became focused on superfluity in the thirteenth century. Natalini believes that an important heritage of the medieval ius commune tradition is the modern western tension between Christian morality, individual liberty, and state authority. The author traces an evolutionary process that begins with Isidore of Seville’s distinction between what is necessary (clothing) and not (ornament) as well as his emphasis on the uses of wealth (rather than the morality or immorality of wealth per se). It continues across the Gregorian Reform (from the school of Chartres to Peter Damian and to St. Bernard), through the twelfth century (Gratian’s Decretum, Alan of Lille’s Summa de arte predicatoria), and into the thirteenth, where the thought of Pope Innocent III accelerates the “giuridicizzazione” of the problem of sumptus/expense. Natalini leans heavily on this recent neologism from contemporary Italian politics (sometimes in the form of “giuridizzazione”) to trace the translation of Christian morality through law into political economy: medieval sumptus, a matter of religious morality and the salvation of the community through obedience to God, becomes early modern luxus, a matter of civic conscience and the well-being of the community through obedience to the state. The crucial turning point and figure in this evolution is St. Thomas Aquinas, whom Natalini credits with using the Aristotelian distinction between ethos and hexis to establish that the quality or status of the person determines what constitutes appropriate use of ornament, which itself is neither a virtue nor a vice. According to the author, this dottrina tomista, with its emphasis on variability, inspired judicial reflection and, ultimately, early modern attempts to legislate limitations on attire appropriate to every human status. Natalini discusses Henry of Susa (Hostiensis), Ubertus of Cesena, Giovanni d’Andrea, Alberico of Rosciate, and, of course, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, highlighting problems of jurisdiction, [End Page 782] proof, and the relation of public and private rights. She then uses the sumptuary legislation of Forlì from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries to illustrate some fruits of this long evolution in one concrete case and closes with reflections on Antonio Roselli’s 1447 consilium, De ornatu mulierum. If approached as an extended essay or thought-piece, the work can sensitize historians to the theological and legal issues raised by medieval and early modern sumptuary legislation. It is not, however, convincing as intellectual history. How, for example, could the dottrina tomista be the “new impulse” driving the legal thought of Henry of Susa (Hostiensis) on sumptuary law when Natalini grounds the...

Rank and Two Aspects of Dress in Elizabethan England

As a contribution to the nascent field of historical anthropology, this paper considers the relation between two aspects of Elizabethan dress and the social order of early modern England. Both the sumptuary legislation which governed dress, and the ornamentation which adorned it are seen to articulate and reconcile the conflicting principles out of which the Elizabethan hierarchy was created. In conclusion, it is suggested that dress and other material aspects of culture assume a special significance for the historical anthropologist. Deprived of verbal testimony, the historical anthropologist must attach new importance to the extant objects in which the ideas, preoccupations and contradictions of culture still adhere.

Alcune osservazioni sulle leges sumptuariae nel quadro delle campagne elettorali di età repubblicana

The paper focuses on the Roman sumptuary legislation during the republican period, moving away from the traditional point of view which relates the leges sumptuariae to the crisis of the mores and the general decline of traditional values after the Punic wars. Instead, the key to understanding the sumptuary laws applied here is the euergetic activity, mainly in its practical aspects. The first part of the paper draws a clear distinction between the provisions limiting “personal luxury” and “euergetic luxury”. The second part juxtaposes the sumptuary laws and the leges de ambitu, observing the mechanisms of direct electoral bribery and indirect political influence in the end of the Republic.

CRISIS OF MORES AND / OR CRISIS OF THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE? OBSERVATIONS ON EUERGETISM AND ROMAN REPUBLICAN LEGISLATION IN THE CONTEXT OF ELECTORAL CORRUPTION

The paper intends to investigate the social crisis in the Late Republic, focusing on the mechanisms to obtain influence over the voting in the comitia. Starting from the dissolution of the clientela system after the II s. BC, the study analyzes the sumptuary legislation and the legislation de ambitu in order to observe the new ways of attracting the favor of the people which the Roman politicians had to develop. Particular attention is given to the rhetoric of the cura morum, used as a cover for the attempts to control the electoral competition.

The Political Economy of Status Competition: Sumptuary Laws in Preindustrial Europe

Sumptuary laws that regulated clothing based on social status were an important part of the political economy of premodern states. We introduce a model that rationalizes the use of sumptuary laws by elites to regulate status competition from below. Our model predicts a non-monotonic effect of income - sumptuary legislation initially increases with income, but then falls as income increases further. The initial rise is more likely for states with less extractive institutions, whose ruling elites face greater status threat from the rising commercial class. We test these predictions using a newly collected dataset of country and city-level sumptuary laws.

Book Review: Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, by Tamara J. Walker

Book Review: Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, by Tamara J. Walker

Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy ed. by Catherine Kovesi

Reviewed by: Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy ed. by Catherine Kovesi Sarah Bendall Kovesi, Catherine, ed., Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy (Early European Research, 14), Turnhout, Brepols, 2018; hardback; pp. xxx, 305; 32 colour illustrations, R.R.P. €90.00; ISBN 9781350098428. The timeline for the birth of modern consumption practices in Western Europe is constantly in scholarly flux. Some say that the modern consumer society began in the nineteenth century in places like America, others in England or France during the late eighteenth century at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Others still will argue for the seventeenth century with the invention of joint-stock companies and the proliferation of cheap goods that trade from the East and West Indies offered European consumers by the end of that century. [End Page 221] In the introduction to this edited collection of twelve essays, derived from a conference held in 2014, Catherine Kovesi pinpoints the birth of modern consumption practices to Italy during the fifteenth century, when debates about luxury and greed were reframed for the first time since antiquity to critique growing trends of aspirational consumption among newly moneyed communities. This is a bold claim to make, but one that this edited collection does so quite convincingly as it moves from discussions of the meanings of luxury and greed in early modern Italy, to essays dealing with the consumption, dissemination, and imitation of luxury consumer goods throughout the Peninsula. Section 1 identifies the meanings of the term ‘luxury’, placing it squarely in the context of what it meant in the changing moneyed and consumer landscape of Florence. Kovesi argues that Italy was the first country in Europe to develop a vernacular term—lusso—in the fifteenth century, to describe consumptive practices by people with new money and aspirations. She argues that tracing the term luxury through the genealogy of the Latin luxus has led historians astray, as lusso is related to luxus/luxuria but was purposely created in the vernacular to critique new cultures of consumption rather than lust/sensuality. Essays by Kovesi, Lino Pertile and Peter Howard in this section all challenge the assumption that luxury and greed were exclusively associated with the elites, as they discuss the difference between magnificence and luxury, the former being the inherited right to extravagance (framed as a virtue) of the elites, the latter being attributed to the newly moneyed. Section 2 and Section 3 carry on discussion by examining how goods such as food, clothing, household objects, and books were consumed and disseminated by craftspeople, street pedlars, vendors, and diplomats throughout the Italian Peninsula and beyond. Essays by Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Rosa Salzburg explore the clothing and small luxury items consumed by non-elites who often skirted the boundaries of sumptuary legislation, while those by Timothy Wilson and Sean Roberts examine luxury gift-giving between women and between diplomats. Jola Pellumbi discusses magnificence in her essay on Venetian senatorial dress, a burdensome expense that could financially cripple those patricians forced to wear them. As these robes reflected the dignity of the state, they were considered a magnificence as opposed to a luxury. However, as many nobles simply could not afford magnificence, the significant question posed is: when does magnificence become luxury? Essays by Laura Giannetti and Rebecca Earle also discuss food and luxury. Earle challenges north-western European ideas about chocolate that associated the food with decadent luxury, pleasure, and idleness. She argues that Spanish discourses stressed chocolate’s ordinariness due to its association with the American colonies where it was widely consumed. Earle’s article, while fascinating, is primarily focused on Spain. Besides a short description of chocolate consumption in the Spanish territories of Sicily and Naples, very little attention is paid to chocolate in a wider Italian context. Was chocolate considered ordinary [End Page 222] in the north of Italy like it was in Naples, or was it a luxury? This question is not answered; probably because it is not part of Earle’s overall research focus. As a result, it sets this otherwise excellent essay out of joint with the rest of the collection. Two of the most...

Metamorphic Heads: A Footnote on Botticelli’s and Pollaiuolo’s Mercanzia Virtues

Metamorphic Heads: A Footnote on Botticelli’s and Pollaiuolo’s Mercanzia Virtues

Gute Ordnung: Ordnungsmodelle und Ordnungsvorstellungen in der Reformationzeit ed. by Irene Dingel and Armin Kohnle (review)

Reviewed by: Gute Ordnung: Ordnungsmodelle und Ordnungsvorstellungen in der Reformationzeited. by Irene Dingel and Armin Kohnle Jeffrey Jaynes Gute Ordnung: Ordnungsmodelle und Ordnungsvorstellungen in der Reformationzeit. Edited by Irene Dingel and Armin Kohnle. Leucorea-Studien zur Geschichte der Reformation und der Lutherischen Orthodoxie, Band 25. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlanganstalt, 2014. 287 pp. This volume features essays on the important early modern theme of “good order” ( Gute Ordnung). The book is one of several resulting from a conference series—“ Die Frühjahrstagungen zur Wittenberger Reformation” (number 10)—most of which have produced works on individual reformers like Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Johannes Bugenhagen, and Philipp Melanchthon. The editors and conference organizers gathered an array of scholars to investigate the growing interest in the political, social, and ecclesiastical ordinances/ Ordnungenof the sixteenth century. The larger umbrella of “policy ordinances” is addressed in an overview chapter by Johannes Staudenmaier, who notes the organizational framework developed by Karl Härter and Michael Stolleis, part of a research project of the Max Plank Institute for Legal History. Several chapters address the primarily secular dimensions of these Ordnungen, ranging from larger territorial legislation ( Landes-ordnungen) to more specific concerns like the regulations of court life (Berger), water rights (Richter), or clothing and luxuries (Weller). Thomas Weller’s chapter on sumptuary legislation ( Kleiderordnungen) offers a particularly instructive example on how arguments for controlling community behavior shifted through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the city of Leipzig, a “fashion [End Page 74]center” of the late sixteenth century, his essay analyzes the numerous Leipzig Kleiderordnungento demonstrate how concerns about divine punishment eventually yielded to an interest in maintaining the social status quo in the early seventeenth century. The authors are attentive to the confessional dimensions of these various ordinances, especially in the chapters that directly address the voluminous church ordinances ( Kirchenordnungen) along with visitation protocols, and related matters like school (Töpfer), university (Kohnle), consistory (Butt), marriage (Jürgens), poor relief (Peters) and burial ordinances (Kolb). Sabine Arend’s essay on Kirchenordnungenprovides a good sense for how these ordinances sought to promote their understanding of “good order” while curbing expressions of disorder, which was often associated with those of rival confessional traditions. Unfortunately, her ability to contrast ordinances from varied perspectives—Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic—is not replicated in several other studies. Most essays concentrate on the Lutheran ordinances, and there is a distinct Saxon flavor throughout the volume. Nevertheless, all essays contain intriguing insights, with bibliography that is up-to-date and valuable. Stefan Michel offers a good assessment of the visitations in Ernestine Saxony, noting both the theological and legal aspects of Melanchthon’s influential Unterricht der Visitatoren. Heiko Jadatz’s chapter on the nearly simultaneous visitations in neighboring Albertine Saxony illustrates how visitations were also employed to bolster traditional Roman Catholic teaching and worship. Legal thinking and Ordnungensurrounding marriage-related matters has received particular attention following the work of John Witte, Law and Protestantism(2002) and the earlier work of Hartwig Dietrich, Das protestantische Eherecht in Deutschland(1970). Henning Jürgen’s contribution on marriage ordinances provides an exceptional overview of this research, with further insights into the thinking rooted in both the Kirchenordnungenand subsequent Eheordnungen. Paired with the article on consistories by Arne Butt, the volume distills a significant body of literature about marriage legislation into a reasonably compact form. Robert Kolb’s final chapter on burial orders is the lone English essay in the book. Kolb mines a host of Kirchenordnungento demonstrate how Luther’s theological [End Page 75]insights regarding death and burial translated into both liturgical practice and the regulation of cemeteries. Irene Dingel’s essay opens this volume and makes the argument that confessions, in their varied ecclesiastical expressions, served an “ordering” function that promoted wider societal concepts of “good order” or the “common good” ( gemeiner Nutz). As noted already in this review, attention to confessional dynamics emerged in each of the essays. Dingel’s comments also provide an apt conclusion to this collection. She explains how confessions, and the varied ordinances they influenced, informed the three arenas of early modern experience: politics ( politia), church ( ecclesia) and household ( oikonomia). In a nearly...

Antiquae sunt istae leges et mortuae: the plebiscitum Claudianum and associated laws

This paper examines the evidence for four laws which restricted the activities of senators. Two of these, the plebiscitum Claudianum of 218 BC, restricting senatorial ship-owning, and the undated prohibition on senators undertaking public contracts are positively attested and widely accepted, even if their purpose and date (in the latter case) are debated. The other two, which prohibited senators from travelling outside of Italy and from owning land outside Italy, are only alluded to indirectly. This paper argues firstly that these two measures deserve much more serious consideration, on the basis both of the negative evidence in their favour and the later legislative tradition; and secondly that all four laws should be imagined not within the later traditions of sumptuary legislation, but as part of the development of imperial rule (and senatorial identity) in the later third century BC.

Uncovering the Historical Body of Florence: Dante, Forese Donati, and Sumptuary Legislation

This paper considers the historical antecedent of Cardinal Latino’s specific interdiction against women’s clothing that exhibited frontal exposure as evoked by Forese Donati in Purgatorio 23, situating this interdiction within the history of sumptuary counsel and legislation. This gendered aspect of Dante’s history of Florence is informed by the political discourse of sumptuary excess amongst Florentine elite families and the tensions amongst such families, both those which had true claims to nobility (such as the Donati), and the upwardly mobile mercantile elite (such as the Cerchi). Dante’s choice of Forese Donati as the speaker of this invective carries implications for Dante’s political thought, as it reflects the concerns of the popolo more than those of elite families. This essay relates the intersection of political critique, concupiscence, and virility to the insufficient covering of Nella in the tenzone between Dante and Forese Donati and elsewhere in the Purgatorio, reading the exposed female body as a signifier of civic decadence and church corruption.

Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire by Eugenia Paulicelli (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire by Eugenia Paulicelli Tracey Griffiths Paulicelli, Eugenia, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Visual Culture in Early Modernity), Farnham, Ashgate, 2014; hardback; pp. 278; 8 colour, 48 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £65.00; ISBN 9781472411709. Eugenia Paulicelli has pursued her interest in the history of Italian style through a series of books and edited collections that focus on fashion in Italian literature and film, addressing both the contemporary scene and earlier epochs. Her new book is a study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century advice literature, costume books, and satirical attacks and defences of fashion. In her opening chapter, Paulicelli revisits a topic she has previously explored with the collection Moda e moderno: dal Medioevo al Rinascimento (Meltemi, 2006), and similarly names this chapter ‘Moda and Moderno’. The chapter introduces themes such as discipline and imitation that will be developed in the remainder of the book. Paulicelli positions fashion as a form of discipline that superseded sumptuary legislation during the early modern period, presenting it as a relatively recent development in an ongoing civilising process that can be traced back as far as the codes of behaviour set out in monastic rules. In discussing imitation, she notes that innovations did not always spread down the social hierarchy, offering the counter-example of slashed clothes, which originated with Swiss mercenaries, later spreading to camp followers, and eventually, aristocrats. The book is divided into three parts, with the first consisting of this initial chapter and another on Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. In the second part, Paulicelli discusses the costume books of Cesare Vecellio and Giacomo Franco, devoting a chapter to each of these entrepreneurial Venetian authors and image-makers. Finally, she considers approaches to fashion in satires and anti-satires, with a chapter on the works of Archangela Tarabotti, forced to take the veil against her will, and another on those of a Benedictine monk, Agostino Lampugnani, both writers associated with the Academy of the Incogniti in Venice. Paulicelli explores the way that identity politics, particularly those of gender and nation, play out in these texts, which were written in an era when the Italian peninsula was politically fragmented and often subject to foreign occupation. The texts repeatedly frame political subjugation as the consequence of an earlier sartorial submission. However, the city from which most of the texts issued, Venice, not only retained its sovereignty throughout this period, but was an important centre for both fashion and printing. Surprisingly, Paulicelli seems to ignore this, along with the enormous influence that Italian culture had in seventeenth-century France, as she laments that nation’s success in snatching the crown of fashion from Italy. The historical emergence of fashion, in the sense that we now know it, constitutes the chief concern of the book. Paulicelli begins with [End Page 266] ‘[t]he etymological trajectories of both la moda and fashion’ (p. 5), and their cognates in other European languages. She supplements this, in the second part of the book, with a fascinating discussion of framing, distortion, and mirroring, applied particularly to the images in the costume books. Finally, she identifies a key development in mid-seventeenth-century Italy, the advent of the modanti or foggiani, groups labelled using ‘neologisms … difficult to render into English: “fashionistas” or “fashion victims” do not completely render the nuances’ (p. 209). Paulicelli contends that writings can teach new ways of seeing the world, arguing for ‘the potential of words and language to exceed and transform the world, now seen through a new lens: fashion’ (p. 221). The book as a whole is aimed at a specialist, academic audience. It studies fashion as a mentality, paying relatively little attention to specific styles, and assumes a general knowledge of the broad developments in the early modern Italian and European fashion and textile trades. Its opening chapter provides an introduction to fashion in early modern Italy, helpfully integrating the English and Italian historiography on this topic. The book also serves to draw attention, in the context of English-language discussions of European fashion, to the importance of the as-yet-untranslated texts...

Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture by Patrick Joseph Ryan (review)

Reviewed by: Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture by Patrick Joseph Ryan Joel T. Rosenthal Master-Servant Childhood: A History of the Idea of Childhood in Medieval English Culture. By Patrick Joseph Ryan. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013. vii + 130 pp. Cloth $67.50. From the perspective of a social historian this short study is a mixed package. The major theme is one of considerable insight, and it sheds a distinctly different light on our approach to childhood in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, Ryan is not a medieval historian; parts of the book take us into realms of theology and epistemology that seem but loosely linked to his more orthodox topic. Also, as a non-specialist he leans on some historiography that may not serve him to best advantage. But, having begun with some caveats and reservations, I want to pay tribute to the way Ryan has dealt with the topic/problem of medieval children and childhood. It is most important to recognize that this book is a “history of the idea of childhood” (my emphasis). Words as labels and symbols are under close scrutiny in the argument, and many of Ryan’s bold insights come from the way in which he traces the etymology and evolution of some key terms. It is the idea of childhood as developed and set into the context of relationships and status, not the details of young lives or quantitative data about orphans or minor heirs that he explicates, that we will explore. As Ryan tells us (on page 13, and then a number of times thereafter), “Childhood was embedded in master-servant relations but this was something more than a hierarchy of labour.” His aim is to shift our view of childhood from an age-based and stages-of-life scenario to one that emphasizes superordination and subordination. We are in the realms of language and ideas rather than of behavior. This is refreshing stuff—taking us well away from the rather tired arguments that still revolved around Philippe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life and its thesis that “childhood” only emerged as a distinct social, familial, and perhaps personal phenomenon in postmedieval European culture and thought. Ryan looks at what we can label as key words—family, matrimony, wench, master, child, bairn, among others—and argues that their early meanings and uses (in Old English and then in Middle English) had more [End Page 321] to do with status than with age as such. Wealth, power, and sexual control, not just a sum of years, was what set the table. For example, “husband” “came to mean married man first, and householder secondarily . . . a land-sex-marriage word complex” (27). The word for the man in a married couple evolved so as to reinforce the essential link between holding property and being of a status to marry and to preside over the (patriarchal) household: “patrimony conferred stewardship” (39). Similarly, in early usage “wife” was not confined to “a man’s woman” (31), and such wider usages as fishwife or ale-wyff or midwife remind us that her marital (and sexual) status was just one definition of her multiple roles. Again, matrimony came from a French term that meant property inherited from one’s mother, an insight into a process of linguistic generalization and of socioeconomic institutionalization (and male appropriation). Drawing on literary materials and (selected) record sources that run into the sixteenth and even the seventeenth centuries, Ryan recognizes the “shift toward age sensitivity” in usage (49). The Bible is a canonical source for this sort of investigation, as in such tales as that of the Holy Family—traced through various versions and then translations—we can follow this theme of the evolution of words and, consequently, of social relationships. Fourteenth century legislation, designed to suppress social unrest unleashed by the decimation of the plague, sought to impose sumptuary legislation and edicts against gaming, among others, “all [of it] designed to support the existing master-servant hierarchy” (56). The importance of asserting a hierarchy of power, wealth, authority, and inherited status was supported by the terminology of...

Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity by Miriam Eliav-Feldon (review)

Reviewed by: Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity by Miriam Eliav-Feldon Mark S. Dawson Eliav-Feldon, Miriam, Renaissance Impostors and Proofs of Identity, Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012; hardback; pp. viii, 292; R.R.P. US$92.00, £60.00; ISBN 9780230547063. This study examines the phenomenon of assumed identity, of passing for somebody one was not, in early modern Europe. It seeks to explain why [End Page 205] people perpetrated such frauds and how the powerful improvised technologies of authentication. Imposture flourished, or doubts about social authenticity were abnormally high in this period, for several reasons. However, the root cause, Miriam Eliav-Feldon contends (in Chapter 2, disproportionately the longest), was religious strife, compounded by serial failures in authentication; those who had claimed or been judged to be of one community were eventually found to belong to another confession or class, prompting further waves of anxiety that all were not as they seemed. The conversion of Jews and Muslims in Spain, Catholics in Protestant territories, and Europeans in the Moorish Mediterranean, triggered religious dissimulation and panic about fifth columns and raised questions concerning the nature of faith and the reliability of knowledge based on sensory perception. Paradoxically, the wars of religion within and without Christendom, between the later fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries, lent plausibility to impostures and otherwise help explain the credulity of contemporaries who took the bait. For example, in the early 1520s, David Reuveni presented himself as the princely emissary for several Tribes of Israel. Both Portuguese and Venetian authorities welcomed him because of the implications for their continuing – yet at times apocalyptic – struggle against Suleiman I. Similarly with the pretence of those alleging they came from the realm of Prester John to aid Western Christendom in its time of need. Layers of deception piled one on top of the other, and this circumstance seems to be the justification for discussing other sorts of impostor: sturdy beggars, false saints, witches, and gypsies (Chapters 4–5). Thus indigents could themselves pretend to be the victims of Ottoman tyranny. Witches masqueraded as proper Christians and mystics were exposed as servants of Satan. And there are suggestions that the Roma presented themselves as pilgrims before they became vagrant. Fatal assumptions were made about their true origin and character: assumptions the Roma may occasionally have owned but which were otherwise foisted on them and appropriated by false gypsies, serving only to tarnish further their reputation. The official response (Chapters 6–8) was varied. Some sought to cure the epidemic with a regime of corporal punishment. Prevention, or at least faltering attempts at it, relied upon policing the appearance of the well-to-do courtesy of sumptuary legislation and watching for bodies marked by earlier run-ins with the law. As more people were thought to be dressing above their station in the context of urban anonymity, or otherwise disguising past stigmas, attempts were made to use bureaucracy rather than bodies to prove identities. Veritable (and verifiable) paper trails were gradually established with central registers, licences and passports, health certificates, and university testimonials. [End Page 206] Citing examples from across Europe, Eliav-Feldon draws extensively on scholarship in several languages. Notwithstanding its ambitious scope and the evidentiary challenges, some will find this collation not quite to their taste. The Introduction avers that this is not a study of identity. However, this seems at odds with establishing imposters’ motives, or arguments for the growing prominence of lineage, and with it the emergence of a racialist mentality. Despite the importance of Spanish edicts concerning blood purity (limpieza de sangre), more than one reference to heraldry’s semiotics (p. 182) would strengthen the case that European elites were preoccupied with who was who. Likewise, consideration of transvestitism, as part of a deliberate fraud, probably requires acknowledgement of ambiguous premodern understandings of sexual difference per se. Notwithstanding some case studies, the book tantalises with terse references to the historiography. Particularly when it comes to the proving of identity, and unmasking impostors, mention is made of archives bearing final witness, but direct quotation from these materials is sparing. This abridges the very processes of identification, of identifying as someone or being identified as somebody else. Some...

Food & Faith in Christian Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Food & Faith in Christian Culture Raymond A. Mentzer Food & Faith in Christian Culture. Edited by Ken Albala and Trudy Eden. [Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History.] (New York: Columbia University Press. 2011. Pp. viii, 265. $79.50 clothbound; $26.50 paperback; $20.99 e-book. ISBN 978-0-231-14996-9 clothbound; 978-0-231-14997-6 paperback; 978-0-231-52079-9 e-book.) Food & Faith in Christian Culture explores the straightforward notion that food has occupied a significant, though underappreciated role in Christian tradition. Although the editors’ assertion of scholarly neglect may be exaggerated, the eleven essays that they have assembled provide an illuminating inquiry into the manipulation of food for religious purposes. They investigate practices across a broad geographic expanse stretching from Europe to the Americas and far beyond to New Zealand. The chronological range is no less impressive; the studies span more than a half-millennium from the late Middle Ages to the present. Still, the principal value of this collection rests on its imaginative themes and innovative approaches. [End Page 770] Some subjects are familiar, even as the authors offer fresh insight. Thus, analyses focusing on the monastic experience bookend the volume. The opening chapter by Salvatore D. S. Musumeci surveys the dietary habits—both conventional and exceptional—among a group of fourteenth-century Florentine monks. Their account books indicate purchases typical of most Florentine households, but the monks consumed these foodstuffs in keeping with the Rule of St. Benedict. In the book’s final chapter, Richard D. G. Irvine probes the enduring significance of eating in silence for contemporary English Benedictines. Simply put, how does sharing a meal foster corporate piety? The volume’s coeditor, Ken Albala, fastens on another key issue—the Reformation’s reconsideration of fasting—and concludes that fasting remained important for both Catholics and Protestants, although they refashioned its character considerably. A closely related aspect of the “reformation” of food and drink was sumptuary legislation. According to Johanna B. Moyer, French regulations, whether Catholic or Protestant, emphasized food discipline as a vehicle for reinforcing community. Antonia-Leda Matalas, Eleni Tourlouki, and Chyrstalleni Lazarou note a similar stress on the disciplinary dynamics of fasting in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Sydney Watts’s study of Lenten observances in France during the Enlightenment takes a slightly different tack. How did theology and new understandings in medical science converge to alter perceptions and practices surrounding Lent? Turning to the recent American past, Heidi Oberholtzer Lee inquires into the ways that the Brethren in Christ promoted the love feast, a collective ritual with physical and spiritual dimensions, as a means to heal divisions and affirm communal harmony. The book’s other coeditor, Trudy Eden, discusses a related topic in American religious history—vegetarianism as a force for spiritual regeneration. She focuses on Charles and Myrtle Fillmore—founders of Unity, a church within the New Thought movement. The ongoing American preoccupation with health, beauty, body, and religion comes together in a delightful essay by Samantha Kwan and Christine Sheikh on Christian weight-loss programs. Equally engaging and revealing are the chapters that treat Amerindian and Maori associations with and attitudes toward bread, that most basic of European foods. In one case, Heather Martel reflects upon a sixteenth-century Italian adventurer in New Spain who expressed disgust for the way in which indigenous women prepared maize bread and wine. His reaction was part of an attempt to avoid contamination of European Christian identity, here encapsulated in foods commonly associated with the Eucharistic meal. According to Hazel Petrie, missionaries in New Zealand discovered that the indigenous people welcomed the introduction of European wheat bread. Less understood perhaps was the manner by which the Maori incorporated the new staple into a precolonial religious matrix. [End Page 771] Altogether, the essays are topical, well written, and stimulating. They nicely capture the diversity, nuance, and complexity surrounding the place and role of dietary practices in Christian culture. Raymond A. Mentzer University of Iowa Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press

‘The inordinate excess in apparel’: Sumptuary Legislation in Tudor England

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of sumptuary legislation in sixteenth century England. It argues that the aims of sumptuary legislation were threefold: that legislators sought to maintain the stability of the common weal through social regulation, moral regulation through the moralization of luxury goods, and to regulate England’s economy, by prohibiting foreign trade in luxury goods, in order to stimulate the home economy and the burgeoning wool and stocking trade.

Sumptuary legislation, material culture and the semiotics of ‘vivre noblement’ in the county of Flanders (14th–16th centuries)

The question addressed in this contribution is a simple one: how was nobility structured in a society in which this particular form of social identity was not yet regulated by the princely state? H...