‘Social skins’: medieval clothing

Clothing is the key signifier of age and other aspects of personal identity: it transforms and extends the corporeal body as a ‘social skin’ (Turner 1993). Clothing is defined here to include not just articles of dress, but hair treatments, jewellery and badges attached to apparel, and items that are suspended or wrapped around the body, comprising belts, girdles, purses, pouches, scabbards and their contents. Dress was integral to embodiment and to the ‘gestural culture’ of the Middle Ages, which judged the quality of the person and their soul on the basis of posture, movement and comportment (Schmitt 1991). Medical ideas about the body also influenced how clothing and jewellery were worn: for example, wedding rings were placed on the leech or healing finger that was believed to hold a vein which flowed directly to the heart (Hindman 2007, 138). Dress punctuated the temporality of the medieval life course: the working clothes of ‘everyday time’ were subject to seasonal change, while ‘religious time’ was marked by the donning of ‘Sunday best’ or items of costume reserved for annual religious festivals and seasonal rites connected especially with youth. Clothing was central to the symbolism of rituals that marked life course transitions from birth to death and it expressed normative constructs of sexual identity that were deemed appropriate to distinct stages of the life course. Finally, the spiritual and apotropaic functions of clothing contributed to an individual sense of well-being (Schneider 2006, 204; after Mauss 1990).