1 - Dressing the Warrior and the Streets of Athens in the Knight's Tale

Summary

Part I: Dressing the Warrior

Colorful, lavish dress is the hallmark of processional spectacles in the Middle Ages, according to accounts of processions in period chronicles, records, and secular romances. Although chronicle depictions of costume are never as detailed as present-day readers might wish, medieval romances often provide sumptuous details, and occasionally medieval records explain or testify to the accuracy of a portion of romance descriptions. Geoffrey Chaucer's romance, The Knight's Tale (KnT), both follows this tradition of costume depiction in its spectacular processions and deviates from it, simultaneously fulfilling and thwarting the audience's expectations of tales which we, now, would classify as within the genre of medieval romance.

Dressing the Major Characters

The description of Arcite's sumptuous funeral garments provides a case in point. In Chaucer's account, tearful Greeks carry Arcite's funeral bier in a manner that echoes funeral procession depictions in antique Athenian grave craters (see Fig. 1.1). His bier is covered in cloth of gold (I, lines 2870–73):

Theseus hath ysent

After a beere, and it al overspradde

With clooth of gold, the richeste that he hadde.

And of the same suyte he cladde Arcite …

In equally opulent garb, in Boccaccio's Teseida, Arcite's body is displayed in garments made of the finest purple fabric:

E acciò che Teseo intero segno

di nobil sangue desse di costui,

tutti vi fè gli ornamenti da regno

venir presenti, e adornarne lui;

li le veste purpuree, con ingegno

fatte, si videro addosso a colui … .

(Book 11, stanza 36)