This volume is the second in Laura Hodges's analysis of the clothing and dress of Chaucer's pilgrims in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. While the first volume (Chaucer and Clothing , 2000) treats categories of dress among the secular pilgrims, Hodges here reaffirms and extends her study with specific attention to Chaucer's clerical and religious characters: the Prioress, Monk, Friar, Clerk, Doctor, Pardoner, Summoner and Parson.
In the introductory chapter, Hodges situates her study between two claims. The first claim is embedded in the logic underlying the division she makes between her two volumes. Her study of secular character costume, she explains, implies that the clothing of the lay pilgrims works as a type of currency, an outward marker of social and economic status; however, as readers turn to the pilgrims who are either in holy orders or otherwise attached to the institutional structures of the church, they must negotiate the signs of clothing as these were primarily intended to make visible a person's spiritual statues, practice and values. It is through a "costume rhetoric"-- Hodges's term, and the second central claim of the book--that clothes signify (or, just as often, fail to signify) a character's inner spiritual truth.
As the key term of Hodges's analysis, "costume rhetoric" offers a way to delineate, describe and implicate not just a particular type of clothing or habit of dress, but an entire structure of associations that functions like language itself, and become embedded in literary systems and texts. Thus, at the end of her first chapter, Hodges observes that "for all the efforts expended by the church, university and civil officials upon regulating the clothing of members of religious orders...deviations from the norm were common enough that they became recognizable metaphors in literature" (28). What follows in the book's chapter-by-chapter treatment of individual pilgrims is an analysis of precisely these metaphors as they participate in the broader rhetoric of clothing. Along with a full description of specific garments, accessories and dress, Hodges wants to reveal Chaucer's innovations in deploying dress as part of his poetic repertoire, and the ways these moments in the pilgrims' portraits have been read (and misread) in Chaucerian scholarship. The result is an analysis that stretches the General Prologue portraits in innovative ways, and returns readers consistently to the historical and material horizons of Chaucer's work.
Although the book's argument for thinking about costume as a rhetorical mode works well in some places, in others the frame yields to what might prove most enduring about this book--Hodges's careful attention to the details of medieval dress. In building a context for her analysis she ranges wonderfully wide, drawing on religious rules, civil sumptuary laws, manuscript illuminations, stained glass windows, wills, church debates, and an array of continental and insular literary sources. Her chronological breadth is equally far-reaching, with details and traditions drawn from points between the tenth and fifteenth centuries. As a result, Hodges makes available for us lost vocabulary, details, and traditions. The book's discussion of wimples, tippets, grys, worsteds, coutepy, ouverveils, vernycles and bokelers, for example, leaves modern readers with a richer contextual understanding and one more nuanced by Hodges's accompanying socio- economic histories and explications.
Occasionally readers might find that the argument for a "costume rhetoric" runs slightly beyond its scope, as in the chapter on Friar Huberd where Hodges suggests "Chaucer clothes Friar Huberd in a combination of garment signs surely chosen with satire in mind and then amplifies this costume sentence with systrophe"(133); the subsequent discussion about the interplay of meanings attached to the Friar's typet and semycope would perhaps emerge more clearly without balancing against rhetorical terms. And although Hodges's copious footnotes provide an important service for future scholars, some trace already dated scholarship, and others include some errors (for instance, Larry Benson is the editor of the Riverside Chaucer, on page 203). These are minor points, however, and readers will find that the book is not only useful but beautifully produced. Hodges's examples are supported with lovely color plates of manuscript and stained glass illustrations, and also with the author's own drawings of key images and figures from a variety of manuscripts. The volume stands as an important contribution to Chaucerian scholarship, and as a model for bringing material studies to bear on literary texts.