Women in Uniform: Dress and Performance in Medieval Court Culture

Abstract

This chapter explores some of the social meanings of the phenomenon such as late medieval understanding of femininity, feminine subjectivity and feminine sexuality. It traces the female heterosexual subject-in-process: a subjectivity that sometimes struggles to emerge from ritual practices the aim of which is to stress marriageability, collective identity, or the subjection of a woman to her husband's or her king's heraldic identity. The chapter considers several representations of courtly women doing things together in groups in late medieval English literature, but will pause longest over the processions and courtly practices described by the female narrators of The Floure and the Leafe an..