Category: Special Series

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“Dressing Up”: Medieval Fables, Fashion, and Social Instability

Woodcut of The Ass and the Lion Skin, from a 1479 incunabulum of Heinrich Steinhöwel’s Fables of Aesop

The tradition of dressing in costumes for Halloween is relatively recent, and regionally limited as well. Such costumes are not intended to convince anyone that they are genuine—no one is supposed to think the person dressing up is really a witch, a superhero, etc.—nor are they meant to be worn for more than an evening. No doubt much of the appeal of Halloween costumes is in how they allow us to playfully assume and express a new, temporary identity. In honor of Halloween, I’d like to consider medieval fables about animals who assume a new identity by “dressing up” as another species. These fables all attempt to promulgate the message that one’s identity cannot be changed, and that trying only leads to disaster. Read against the grain, however, such stories in fact reveal that human identity is unlike species difference—that our identities are mutable and contextual, and that this is a source of anxiety for those invested in social hierarchies.

I can think of at least four fables where an animal uses another animal’s skin (or feathers) to represent themselves as a different species. These fables include The Ass and the Lion’s Skin (Perry Index 188/358); The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram (Perry Index 705); The Rook among the Peacocks (Perry Index 472); and The Wolf that Dressed in a Sheepskin (Perry Index 451). The animals’ motivations differ, but in attempting to take up their new role, they start to behave differently than before as well. In the first three fables mentioned, the disguised animal aims to represent themselves as “better” than they really are—stronger, more intimidating, more beautiful—and begins to not only look but act the part. By “dressing up” they are trying to move up as well, in a sense.

Woodcut of The Rook and the Peacock, from Steinhöwel’s Aesop (1479).

The donkey in The Ass and the Lion Skin runs around frightening other livestock in his lion pelt; the sheep in The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram dons the skin of his master’s deceased sheepdog and aggressively pursues the wolf who would harm his flockmates; and the rook adorns himself with peacock feathers and joins the peacocks, strutting around proudly. In The Wolf that Dressed in a Sheepskin (known in proverb form as the “wolf in sheep’s clothing”), the wolf’s intentions are more sinister, as he feigns harmlessness in order to insinuate himself amongst his would-be victims, before he is slaughtered for dinner by the unwitting shepherd. The other three fables conclude with the animals being recognized for what they “really” are, and then hurt or killed as a consequence.

The morals of these medieval fables often draw comparisons between species and social position, particularly class—you shouldn’t aim at too much upward mobility, or wish for what others have, lest it backfire, with you ending up in a worse position than before. For example, the moral to late medieval Scottish poet Robert Henryson’s version of The Dog, the Wolf and the Ram (The Wolf and the Wether) asserts:

Heir may thow se that riches of array
Will cause pure men presumpteous for to be;
Thay think thay hald of nane, be thay als gay,
Bot counterfute ane lord in all degre.
Out of thair cais in pryde thay clym sa hie
That thay forbeir thair better in na steid
Quhill sum man tit thair heillis ouer thair heid… (lines 2595–2601)

Thairfoir I counsell men of everilk stait
To knaw thame self and quhome thay suld forbeir,
And fall not with thair better in debait,
Suppois thay be als galland in thair geir:
It settis na seruand for to vphald weir,
Nor clym sa hie quhill he fall off the ledder:
Bot think vpon the wolf and on the wedder. (lines 2609–2616)1

Here you can see that rich attire will cause poor men to be arrogant; they think they have no superior, if they are dressed as fine, but they imitate a lord in every way. Out of their condition, in pride, they climb so high that they don’t refrain anywhere from injuring their superiors, until someone tips their heels over their heads…

Therefore, I advise men of every rank to know themselves and whom they should refrain from injuring, and fall not into contention with their superior, even if they are as stylish in their dress: it suits no servant to keep up strife, nor to climb so high that he falls off the ladder: just think of the wolf and of the wether.

Woodcut of The Wolf and the Wether, from Steinhöwel’s Aesop (1479).

The narrator’s “counsell” did not just reflect a private opinion. From 1429/30, James I had imposed sumptuary legislation in Scotland, which limited expensive textiles such as silks and some kinds of furs to upper social strata.2 Such legislation was not exclusive to late medieval Scotland, but could be found in many regions across the world, through the eighteenth century.3 “In the case of medieval and early modern Europe,” says historian Lorraine Daston, “over a period of five hundred years (c. 1200–1800), these regulations not only failed to stamp out excess (or what might now be called conspicuous consumption), they arguably exacerbated the very ills they were meant to remedy.” In other words, not only did people not abide by these regulations, the regulations themselves could spur a sort of sartorial “arms race,” inspiring clothesmakers to come up with novel extravagances that were not yet forbidden,4 and consumers to keep up with the newest fashions.

Clothing can visually signify so many aspects of identity (such as class, gender, occupation, religion, and political affiliations), yet the details are inconstant over time and from one place to the next, and clothing can easily be taken on and off. The abovementioned fables, admonitory as they are, express unease with the instability of human social categories as expressed through clothing. Fables often map social hierarchy onto species, and in doing so, they suggest that there is something “natural,” something immutable, about these hierarchies—that a poor man and a lord are as distinct from one another as a sheep and a dog, or a rook and a peacock. But if these hierarchies were really so natural and immutable, the fables wouldn’t have cautionary morals that tell people not to “forget their place.” There would be no need for the admonition, just as there would be no impetus to create (and update) sumptuary regulations, were it not for people constantly breaking boundaries in their fashion choices.

Linnet Heald
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. Denton Fox, ed., The Poems of Robert Henryson (Clarendon Press, 1981), pp. 96–7. Modern English translations are my own. ↩︎
  2. Maria Hayward, “‘Outlandish Superfluities’: Luxury and Clothing in Scottish and English Sumptuary Law from the Fourteenth through the Seventeenth Century,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 97. ↩︎
  3. For a global history of sumptuary legislation, see The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c. 1200–1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack. ↩︎
  4. Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022), p. 156. ↩︎

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Ivo of Chartes, De adventu Domini (On the Advent of the Lord)

Born around 1040, Ivo of Chartres is primarily known to modern scholarship as a canonist, and he is occasionally recognized as a prolific writer of letters, but relatively little regard has been given  to his surviving collection of homilies [1]. This scholarly neglect has been most keenly demonstrated by the absence of critical editions of the sermons, despite the call of Roger Reynolds over thirty years ago, with the overall effect of reducing the quality of academic discourse on one of the more prominent liturgists of the period of the Investiture Controversy [2].

Cambridge, Corpus Christi, Parker Library 289. Ivo of Chartres, Sermo de sacramentis neophitorum, here ascribed to Hugh of St. Victor. Images courtesy of The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. 

The text most commonly cited in scholarly literature, and the one used in my translation of this homily, is that published by Jacques Paul Migne in Patrologia Latina vol. 162, which is in turn based on previous editions by Fronteau and Hittorp. Although I was not able to consult them within the scope of this project, more than seventy manuscripts survive that contain some or all of the homilies included in the Migne edition. The most important would be Chartres, Bibliothèque Municipal 138, which formerly belonged to Chartres Cathedral, but it was heavily damaged in the Allied bombing of the city during the Second World War and is now largely unreadable. The remaining manuscripts are distributed broadly across Western Europe, with large concentrations in the British Museum, various colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican. A surprising number of the extant witnesses date to the twelfth century, suggesting that this collection became popular shortly after its creation. The collection as a whole, to the best of my knowledge, has never been translated into a modern language. This specific sermon, however, was partially translated in the late 1940s as part of a broader gathering of works from across the Patristic and Medieval homiletic tradition [3].

The homilies in Ivo’s collection fall broadly into two categories. The first, encompassing numbers 1–6 and 22–24, are essentially liturgical commentaries, offering detailed allegorical explorations of various rites (e.g., Sermo I, De sacramentis neophytorum), other incidental features (e.g., Sermo III, De significationibus indumentorum sacerdotium), or specific prayers (e.g., Sermo XXII, De Oratione Dominica) of the Church. The balance of the homilies are on the feasts of the church, beginning with Advent and working through the feasts of the Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany,  Purification (Candlemas), and the Lenten and Paschal cycles. The audience for some or all of these homilies appears to have been an assembly of the local clergy of Chartres: many of the manuscripts add the phrase “in synodo habitus” (something like “considered in synod”) to the titles of some of the texts, and even in the text below Ivo addresses his audience as “Your Fraternity,” strongly suggesting, at least to me, that he was speaking to other clerics [4].

The text presented below is the first of the festal homilies and discusses Advent, or, as Ivo insists, both Advents of Christ. The entirety of the work maintains a parallel structure, contrasting the first Advent, i.e., the earthly ministry of Christ, with the second, during which Christ will return as judge. Throughout, an emphasis is placed on the redemptive and restorative work that has already been accomplished during the “hidden” Advent, which prepares his audience for the completion of salvation in the second, “manifest,” coming.

Nick Kamas
PhD in Medieval Studies
University of Notre Dame

  1. The most comprehensive study of Ivo of Chartres is by Rolf Sprandel, Ivo von Chartres und seine Stellung in der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1962). His life is also occasionally discussed in other secondary literature, especially on Ivo as a canonist, e.g., Christof Rolker, Canon Law and the Letters of Ivo of Chartres (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
  2. Roger Reynolds, “Liturgical Scholarship at the Time of the Investiture Controversy: Past Research and Future Opportunities,” The Harvard Theological Review, 71 (1978): 109–124).
  3. Ray C. Petry, ed., No Uncertain Sound, Sermons that Shaped the Pulpit Tradition, (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1948), 140–142.
  4. Credit belongs to Margot Fassler for suggesting the setting for these homilies, The Virgin of Chartres (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 136.
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Melusine: The Myth, the Woman, the Legend

I recently gave a guest lecture during Dr. Megan Hall’s fall 2024 course entitled “Witches, Warriors, and Wonder Women: Women, Power, and Writing in History.” To prepare for my visit, students read excerpts from Jean d’Arras’s Melusine; Or, the Noble History of Lusignan as translated and edited by Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox (Penn State UP, 2012). The story of Melusine, for those not in the know, is steeped in folklore. Various accounts of the tale involve a fairy woman named Melusine who takes on a half-serpent form from the waist down during part of the week and must hide this from her lover lest they suffer the consequences! Jean’s version of the tale, which dates to 1393, offers an account of the founding of the Lusignan dynasty and how Melusine, a half-fairy woman cursed to assume a half-serpent form on Saturdays, played a major role in its establishment and prestige. The House of Lusignan in its heyday counted Crusader kings among their ranks. My goals were to get Dr. Hall’s students thinking about the representation of non-humanness, the ways in which Melusine wields and exercises power, the significance of relating a historical family’s lineage to a fairy founder, and the truth claims that Jean makes. Certainly a tall order for our hour and fifteen minutes together, but trust me: the students rose to the occasion!

Tour Mélusine was built at the end of the 12th century/beginning of the 13th century to support the fortified town of Vouvant in western France. It is a vestige from when members of the House of Lusignan built a castle in the area.
Legend has it that Melusine herself built the tower in a single night. (Right, close up) Note the weather vane at the top! It’s shaped like Melusine’s half-serpent form.

The text’s prologue immediately draws you into Jean’s narrative web. I find it striking how he claims to weave together various sources and reconciles them with his Latin Christian faith so that he can then go on and discuss Melusine. He references Aristotle and Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in his discussion of marvels. Yet, he writes that “even those well versed in science can hear or see things they cannot believe but which are nonetheless true. I mention these matters because of the marvels that occur in the story I am about to tell you, as it pleased God my Creator and at the behest” of his patron, John, Duke of Berry (20). The marvels that Jean references, of course, are the ones associated with fairy magic and power. Fairies—and Jean references Gervase of Tilbury’s account of fairies for this portion of the prologue—can take on the form of beautiful human women. They can marry human men and even bear children with them, but these men must make promises to their fairy wives and uphold them. These promises can range from a prohibition from seeing the fairy wife nude to never seeing her in childbed.

According to Jean’s summary of Gervase, “[a]s long as these men kept their promises, they increased in rank and prosperity, but at the moment they broke them, they lost the women, and their fortunes slowly declined” (21). In a few short paragraphs, Jean not only tries to bolster the authority of his tale with these references to notable predecessors, but he also builds the world of fairies for his audience. Melusine then is but one example of how the marvel of fairies can operate, leading to some major consequences. As a class, we tried to make sense of Jean’s claims and how he reconciles fanciful fairy tales with what seemed like major authoritative sources. Surely, there must be something special about fairies—why else would Jean spend so much time insisting on their existence and the truth of the tale he is about to share? Furthermore, why would a powerful family like the Lusignans want to connect their family line to a fairy? After discussing the prologue, we were ready to tackle the rest of the text.

Raymond walks in on his wife, Melusine, in her bath and discovers she has the lower body of a serpent. Illustration from the Jean d’Arras work, Le livre de Mélusine (The Book of Melusine), 1478.

The tale unfolds as Jean recounts Melusine’s first encounter with her soon-to-be husband, Raymondin. Melusine’s enchanting beauty causes Raymondin to fall in love at first sight. The two marry under one important condition: that he never attempt to see her on Saturdays. Ever! Unbeknownst to Raymondin, on Saturdays Melusine keeps away from him and hides the fact that her lower half takes on a serpentine form. For years, they enjoy a prosperous marriage. They have numerous sons together, and the majority of them, according to Jean, go on to be rulers of Cyprus, Armenia, and more. Melusine takes on the role of master planner and architect. She builds fortresses and advises her husband on how to increase his wealth and prestige. This marital bliss, however, comes to an end when Raymondin spies on Melusine and discovers her Saturday secret. Though he keeps it to himself for some time, in a moment of anger he reveals knowledge of her weekly transformation and weaponizes it against her in an argument. Since he breaks his promise to her, Melusine takes leave of him. When his death nears, she returns in the form of a dragon.

Dr. Hall’s students truly impressed me with their thoughtful engagement with the text. We had conversations about female agency and power. I asked them to think about narratives parallels in the text and the role of curses and magic across similar events. I pointed out how when fairies and humans reproduce, their progeny bear remarkable physical features ranging from gigantism to having an unusual number of eyes. We pondered what a prestigious family like the Lusignans would gain from claiming a half-fairy woman as a major progenitor and have her powers be a major explanation for their wealth and prestige. I had so much fun diving in the text with them. It was clear to me that they had plenty to say about the ways in which the text represents various interpersonal dynamics. Melusine’s fairy qualities add to her allure and ability to influence those around her, for better or worse.

As our short time together came to an end, I asked them to think about Melusine’s legacy and afterlives. The legend of Melusine has endured and continued to captivate over the centuries. The major coffee chain Starbucks, for instance, has a rendition of Melusine as its logo (though the company’s own lore obscures this link!). For the jazz fans reading, please know that there is an incredible musician by the name of Cécile McLorin Salvant, whose seventh solo album, Mélusine, was released in March 2023. In the description for the album on the website Bandcamp[1] , Salvant unpacks the significance of the Melusine story and how it resonates with her.

Album art for Cécile McLorin Salvant’s Mélusine (2023).

What I find striking about Salvant’s reflections on the Melusine story is her reading of how significant gazes are. She shares that the tale is “also the story of the destructive power of the gaze. Raymondin’s sword pierces a hole into [Mélusine’s] iron door. His gaze does too. The gaze is transformative and combustible. She sees that he is secretly seeing her. Her secret is revealed. This double gaze turns her into a dragon.” Dr. Hall’s students definitely picked up on the power of the gaze but also recalled that it is a power that had to be weaponized before it could transform. In other words, when Raymondin first sees Melusine’s true form, he keeps his transgression to himself. His gaze is a breach of trust, and Melusine knows that her husband spied on her but decides to forgive him because he maintains her secret. However, when he becomes enraged, his anger causes him to lose all discretion. Raymondin angrily reveals that he knows about Melusine’s weekly transformations and resents her. The students recognized that it was precisely this resentment that made the revelation of the secret so powerful.

Another powerful way that Salvant relates to the Melusine story is through the idea of hybridity. Salvant was born in the United States to a French mother and a Haitian father. She spent ample time studying music in Aix-en-Provence, France. She is intimately familiar with negotiating various languages and cultures. When discussing the album Mélusine, she says it is “partly about that feeling of being a hybrid, a mixture of different cultures.” Though we did not get ample time to discuss Salvant’s feeling of hybridity, I do love how she draws a connection between her experiences and that of the legendary Melusine, who also had to navigate different cultures and human/non-human experiences. I find it beautiful that the tale of Melusine endures after all this time and can inspire people to explore the intersections of their own identity and reflect on how they experience the world.

While students were packing up their bags and heading out the door, one student lingered behind and wanted to keep the conversation going. This student wanted to talk about how Melusine’s representation of fairies as having conflict with God struck them; in their culture, fairies and even gnomes are guardians and protectors. The enthusiasm that the student exuded was infectious! And reflecting on this moment now, this just speaks even more to the allure not just of Melusine but of the magical realm at large: a space of play and imagination, sure, but also of power relations, of fidelity, of exploring identity, and so much more.

Anne Le, Ph.D.
Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow
Medieval Institute
University of Notre Dame

https://cecilemclorinsalvant.bandcamp.com/album/m-lusine