9 - The Lexicon of Apparel in the Pastourelle Corpus : Refashioning Shepherdesses

Summary

A unique lexicon of dress is found in medieval pastourelle poetry, a genre refashioned across Europe in hundreds of iterations and in multiple languages. Each poem was a unique variation on an established pattern. Dress constitutes one of several of its elements that could be tailored to make a new song. The familiar formula was told from the point of view of a narrator from an implicitly courtly or urban milieu. Many begin with a version of the formula “I was out riding the other day,” implying a cavalier, a man of enough status to have a horse. In what has been labeled the “classic” pastourelle model, he encounters a girl outside town in a “natural” setting, often a pasture. In another type, he finds peasants carousing. The girl encountered is usually a shepherdess (Old French pastourelle, pastore, pastoure, pasteure; Occitan pastora), hence the generic term. Sometimes she is of unspecified status or a dream vision. As poets vary the details of the encounter, the genre follows the fashionable modus operandi of personalizing smaller details while conforming to a generally recognized form. Usually there is attempted seduction, frequently with an offer of apparel to woo her. They debate in various ways whether or not she should accept his suit. “Joy” in the grass may ensue, or alternatively she may reject him, escape from him, or mock him. In other versions, he rapes her, which may also be represented through clothing.

Tropes involving clothing and accessories feature in both discursive modes of the genre's rhetoric, narration and dialogue, as observed the editor of the most comprehensive multilingual corpus, William D. Paden, and others. Many poems frame the proposed exchange with the narrator's description of the girl's initial dress, which is what compels him to approach her, and this will be the primary focus of the present study. The descriptions often offer glimpses of many kinds of clothing he finds attractive in some way, whether because they are humble, revealing, beautiful, or otherwise signal her availability.

Questions concerning what dress in the poems expresses about status have troubled critics. John Friedman observed that the pastourelle was “one type of medieval literature devoted specifically to the consideration of a lower class by a higher where the clothes of rustics form the subject of discussion.” While that is often true, it is not always the case.