Masculinities and the Medieval English Sumptuary Laws

Unlike the late-medieval sumptuary laws of Italy, southern France, and many other European regions, English sumptuary legislation of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was focused on the dress, not of women but of men. Because of the relatively little attention paid to women, the matter of gender has hardly been attended to in considering the English case. Instead, class (that is rank, status, or estate, to use terms often preferred by medievalists) has been the focus of scholarly discussions, and the laws have been used to examine the subtle gradients of that stratified society and the anxieties awakened by social mobility. Yet the English laws did construct gendered models: models of masculinity, specifically the masculinity of the knights, gentry and burgesses who were their overriding focus. This article examines the importance of dress to late medieval masculinities; the prescriptions for knightly, gentry and burgess clothing laid out by the sumptuary documents; the authorship of the documents, and lenient stance towards women's adornment. Focusing on the knights who likely had a dominant role in the drafting of the petitions, it argues that it is essential to consider the parliamentary context in which they arose and uses the concepts of homosociality and hegemonic and complicit masculinities to explain why such men may have wanted to limit their own luxurious display while at the same time protecting their privileges.