1. Jules David Prown, “The Truth of Material Culture: History or Fiction” from History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. Steven Lubar and W David Kingery (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 1.
2. have focused on representations of courtly clothing in literary texts. See, for example, E.Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed: Reading Through Clothes in Medieval French Culture. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002);
3. Susan Crane, The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). For a historical approach, see Kay Staniland, “The Great Wardrobe Accounts as a Source for Historians of Fourteenth-Century Clothing and Textiles,” Textile History 20 (1989): 275–81. Clothing was a favorite gift in courtly culture. Brigitte Buettner, “Past Presents: New Year’s Gifts at the Valois Courts, c. 1400,” Art Bulletin 83.4 (2001), argues that seasonal courtly gifts, étrennes, performed a kind of ‘symbolic alchemy’ whereby a ritual is produced in order to suppress the reality of economic exchanges, a ‘sincere fiction of a disinterested exchange’ that wove people into a complex web of prestation and counterprestation allowing social cohesion and competition to be expressed and perpetuated,” (618). The key to this kind of gift-giving, she points out, is that it was done in semipublic rituals instead of privately;
4. See also the overview by Christopher Tilley, “Ethnography and Material Culture,” in Handbook of Ethnography, ed. Paul Atkinson et al. (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 258–72.
5. Mauss’s work was translated as The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison. Introduction by E. E. Evans-Prit chard (Glencoe, IL.: The Free Press, 1954).