Peacocks and Penguins

Peacocks and Penguins: The Political Economy of European Cloth and ColorsAuthor(s): Jane SchneiderSource: American Ethnologist, Vol. 5, No. 3, Political Economy (Aug., 1978), pp. 413-447Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/643750 .

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peacocks and penguins: the political economy of European cloth and colors

JANE SCHNEIDER-City University of New York Graduate Center

In southern Italy, as in much of southern Europe, adult women commonly wear black

clothing. Black is the official color of mourning, which has led most observers to conclude that its wearers are communicating a funerary message (for example, Banfield 1958:59). A symbolic analysis of this message might focus on the opposition between bright colors and black, or on the correspondence of this opposition to life and death and to the asym- metrical structure of male-female relations in Mediterranean societies. Such an analysis would assume a close association between the color black and death-an association that Turner explores in his essay on color symbolism (Turner 1967:89). But, even if one could prove that the condition of death spontaneously elicits images that are clad in black-and there are important exceptions-one would still have to account for the many nonfunerary uses of black dress in European culture as a whole. Beside the attire of women on the Mediterranean littoral, there are the cassocks of the Catholic priesthood, the robes of judges, the smocks of school children, and the shirts of Italian fascist squadristi-all black garments. In addition, there are the black fashions of past centuries: the clothes of nobles, merchants, and others in the Venetian Republic, at the fabulous black court of Philip II in sixteenth-century Spain, of governors and burghers in Protestant circles north of the Alps, and so on. Dark robes or tunics were the preferred dress of radical heretics such as the Beguines and Hussites (Cohn 1957). Especially notable was the black of monastic orders, one of which, the Benedictines, acquired the epithet "black monks."

From these examples it appears that black dress is to some degree associated with Chris- tianity. Although not exclusively a religious symbol, it has, over several centuries, expressed for Christians a state of ritual purity. Thus Paul Fickeler's survey of cult colors in religious landscapes portrays a substantial overlap between Christian ceremonial and black

This paper relates color symbolism in European dress to the historical geography of textile manufacturing and dyeing, dating back to the Middle Ages. Its central concern is the widespread use of black, not only as a col- or of mourning, but also as a mode for communicating religious and political goals. Black clothing, it is argued, constituted both a practical and a symbolic means of resisting the luxury, polychrome fabrics that older and more developed civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean exported. Although beautiful and tempting, these textiles were instruments of hegemony, for they were produced under monopoly conditions furthered by the highly uneven world distribution of dyestuffs. In Europe they commanded basic resources-slaves and bullion-in exchange and thus created an unequal balance of trade. Black cloth, which contributed in many different ways first to arrest and then to reverse this imbalance, was a totally indigenous product that native craftsmen manufactured and brought to perfection using native raw materials. As such, it had something in common with contemporary symbols of national liberation, perhaps even when it called attention to death.

European cloth and colors 413



because, in his view, Christians "suppressed the original white mourning color" throughout Europe. Fickeler also shows that, except for Moslem women in the Mediterranean area, black has a limited distribution in the great religions of the Orient, in which gold, yellow, or

white, broken intermittently by red, blue, and green, are the dominant colors (Fickeler 1962:96-103). Yet, even though the use of black and the practice of Christianity coincided to a large extent, there was considerable variation in the social conditions of those who wore black. They were men and women, rich and poor, Protestants and Catholics. Perhaps the greatest contrast was between deeply ascetic and egalitarian critics of the established

order, committed to a life of apostolic poverty, and kings or dukes and their courtiers, for whom black dress came in satins and velvets, lined with fur and embroidered with jewels or

gold and silver thread. This picture would vary still further were it to include the witches and other underworld figures who frequently appeared in black.

As an alternative to a symbolic analysis of black dress, I propose a historical reconstruction in which many of the symbol's manifestations are linked together, not

through any structural similarities in the diverse situations they represent, but rather as

sequential aspects of the development of textile manufacturing and exchange. My thesis is that black dress was a "key symbol" around which Europeans rallied at various points in their history, as they warded off, defended against, and ultimately reversed the

hegemony of manufacturing centers, more developed than their own, that exported an

array of brightly colored cloths. Black cloth, even of very high quality, was relatively easy to produce under the local conditions that prevailed in Europe from the eleventh

century. But polychrome cloth was not, for its manufacture depended upon access to

quality dyestuffs whose world distribution was, like the distribution of silks and spices, concentrated in the Orient and poorly represented in the West. Until the invention of coal tar dyes and other chemical substitutes in the nineteenth century, this highly uneven world distribution of reputable dyes, plus the role of financially precocious merchants and skilled craftsmen in connecting dyestuffs to cloth, led to monopoly conditions in textile industries with a dyeing and finishing capability. These industries flourished in the eastern Mediterranean but were underdeveloped in Europe. Where they thrived, they were the foundation for accumulations of capital and power, as beautifully dyed and finished cloth moved against basic resources such as food and slaves in long-distance trade. Disadvantaged by the resulting imbalances that generally favored "the East" and

by the social dislocations that accompanied them, many Europeans were drawn to movements that brought into ritual and economic focus a color that was cheaply and ef-

fectively produced using indigenous raw materials.

In other words, the use of black dress was an integral part of the evolution of a Euro-

pean civilization, separate from and independent of the great Mediterranean and Orien- tal civilizations to which it was heir. Not just a distinctive symbol, black also contributed in a substantive way to a reordering of trade relations, so that Europe could import primary products and export finished goods.

I begin my account of this centuries-long transformation with the Middle Ages, when

Byzantium and Moslem Spain were sources of polychrome cloth that Europeans acquired through the export of slaves. It was in this period that black first became widely used in

Europe, being furthered above all by the monastic orders. I will attempt to show how their use of black dress nurtured the expansion of textile industries in Flanders-the ma-

jor region of cloth manufacture in medieval Europe-and also why Flemish producers chose to concentrate on black (rather than, for instance, on red or purple) as their special color. Although Turner presents a forceful case for evaluating pigments according to their "magico-religious properties" rather than their abundance or scarcity, I nevertheless think that the dyestuffs' trade must be considered in evaluating this choice (Turner 1967:87-88).

414 american ethnologist



Regarding the choice of black for mourning: if Fickeler is correct, funerary black

replaced funerary white in the Middle Ages. I will suggest that attention be focused not so much upon the properties of the color, as on the meaning that death acquired in this

period; for, like the early Christians, medieval Europeans came to see death as a radical-

ly egalitarian state in which riches were not only irrelevant, but also an obstacle to salvation. This corresponds rather closely to the nonfunerary contexts in which

polychrome luxuries were deemed evil, and for which the use of black dress was considered appropriate. In other words, black evoked commitment to austerity and opposition to indulgence in funerary and nonfunerary situations alike.

Because the medieval period was a turning point in the rise of a civilization in Europe, it

occupies a central place in this account. The thesis that black dress was a key symbol in a

revolutionary transformation is also examined for later periods, however. In these periods, the Renaissance and the Modern, centers of polychrome textile manufacture were no

longer external to Europe, but had grown up within it, first in northern Italy, later in the North Atlantic countries of England, northern France, and Holland. These new centers attracted various goods with their cloth exports, the most significant of which was gold and silver. Tracing changes in the geography of textiles, I will also locate reactions to the con-

sequent drain of bullion. Depending upon social position, these reactions varied from the radical rejection of all luxuries to elaborations of black in which exotic textures and in- tricate embroidery compensated for monotony of tone. I will suggest that these variations, however different from one another, shared in the central meaning of medieval black dress

because, like the earlier example, they too were embedded in processes of indigenous growth and development. All communicated a message of restraint vis-a-vis foreign-made cloth of many colors.

By examining manifestations of black dress over time, we discover that, more than a

funerary color, it resembled key symbols of national liberation with which we are familiar

today. Like these symbols it bore a complex relationship to social class. Such symbols tap egalitarian sentiments when "national" leaders speak through them to expel compradors and imperialist agents from the higher strata of the body politic; but they often become routinized, ceremonialized, and elitist when the body politic is on its own. The process of routinization in turn calls forth "reformations," in which groups disadvantaged by the new

alignment of forces strip the original symbols of their encrusted accumulations of pomp and splendor so as to use them, in purified form, to announce a renewed revolution. In the

resulting conflict, class and regional enemies speak to each other in different dialects of the same language: embroidered black and plain black coexist in struggle.

The analogy of black dress with recent liberation symbolism is only partial; drawing it re-

quires the collapse of several centuries into fifty years or less. Yet it is useful as a way to

clarify how symbolic systems might be analyzed in a materialist framework without resort-

ing to overly simple concepts like "mystification" (which suggests that ideology reduces to a sophisticated form of trickery invented by power holders to fool the people they dominate). The national liberation movement is not exclusively an economic phenomenon. Growing out of the dynamics of unequal exchange among classes and among distant

peoples, it is a complex composite of simultaneously unfolding economic, political, social, and ideological events. Some of these events carry more weight than others because they involve, on the one hand, forces operating in the world economy and, on the other hand, the ecological potentialities and limitations of a more or less territorially defined population. Under certain conditions, events of this type may even structure outcomes. I think of the politics surrounding copper in Chile or oil in Nigeria as examples. In the differentiation of Europe from older civilizations, the appearance and expansion of textile industries seem to have been decisive. It was Carlyle's view, for example, that society is founded on cloth. Comprehensive historians such as Bloch and Braudel also suggest that cloth




manufacturing was the central element in the emergence of an aggressive West (Bloch 1962:70; Braudel 1972, Vol. I: 213, n. 202; also see Bernard 1972:228; and Murra 1962, for the importance of cloth to the Inca). This is not to argue that the growth of textiles caused everything else, only that the flow of finished cloth was a diagnostic predictor of competition for power among groups, of their symbiosis and interdependence, of the penetration of one group by the exports of another, and of the range of possible responses. It is in the fluid and dynamic context of political economy that this paper explores the meaning of color symbolism in dress to historical process (see Wolf 1964:67-71).

medieval Europe and Byzantium

Constantinople in the Middle Ages was a city of a half-million people and the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium. Persian and Moslem cities were also highly developed, as was the Islamic Caliphate at Cordoba, although on a smaller scale. In a recent book, A.J. Hodgett draws our attention to the unbalanced exchanges that from the fifth to the twelfth century kept Europe underdeveloped in relation to Byzantium. In part this imbalance was cultural, for the peoples of the Byzantine Empire enjoyed a higher standard of living in town and countryside as well as city than did Europeans. The empire set more sophisticated intellectual and artistic standards and exported "technical know-how, not in manufacturing processes but in building design and decoration," thereby influencing physically the art and architecture of Europe (Hodgett 1972:113 ff.).

But the imbalance was also economic, for the Byzantine Empire exported manufactured luxuries: silverware, carved ivories, jewels, mosaics, and textiles-fine woolens, cottons, linens, and, especially, fine silks. At a disadvantage in relation to Persia, which had better access to the trade routes carrying this Oriental fiber, Byzantium achieved its breakthrough when two Nestorian Christian monks smuggled silkworms into the Imperial territory. The

possibility of raising the worms domestically spurred the Emperor Justinian to reorganize the industry and, from the time of his initiative in the latter part of the sixth century, silk manufacture provided the basis for a "jealously guarded" fortune (Braudel 1973:237). As

Hodgett points out, the silk monopoly enabled the empire to pay for its imports with manufactures instead of gold, and the favorable trade balance that resulted maintained the value of its gold coin, the solidus, for a few hundred years during which it served as a

currency of "international" trade (Hodgett 1972:119). Byzantine cloth was not only finely woven; it came in rich brocades and was often em-

broidered with gold and silver thread. Moreover, it was beautifully dyed. The most ex-

quisite color, a royal purple, was never widely distributed, being reserved for the Imperial court and special friends. Its reputation, however, far exceeded this limited arena and it was supplemented by splendid violets, yellows, and greens. In part because of these colors, Constantinople was known to Europeans as the richest and most magnificent city in the

world, a city at which "none was so bold as not to tremble" (quoted in Bernard 1972:290). Certainly polychrome colors permitted it to become a cosmopolitan center of fashion as its courtiers abandoned the plain Roman toga for Mandarin-style coats of stiff, embroidered brocade (Boissonnade 1964:47-58).

Who, in Europe, received Byzantine (and Arab) luxuries, and what did they send back in

exchange? Client princes and prelates, rich noblemen and merchants all used imported textiles and other finery to distinguish themselves from, and to manipulate, status inferiors. Sometimes they received these perquisites as gifts from the emperor, in which case the

quid pro quo was political loyalty. But Europeans also traded a number of primary goods to

Byzantium: timber, honey, salt, wax, furs, and, most importantly, slaves. The flow of slaves




was complex, for the petty Germanic kingdoms that had emerged with the fall of the Roman Empire were also slave societies. Nor were all of them equally vulnerable to the long-distance trade in slaves. The Franks, whose ethnic label indicated their relative freedom, both acquired servile labor from the same sources as Islam and Byzantium- mainly Saxony and Thuringia, Brittany and Wales, England and Slavic Europe-and they earned revenues from taxing the transit of slaves through their territory (Verlinden 1955:672-680, 707-731). Yet the Frankish war machine proved unable to compete for human resources with Mediterranean civilizations, a limitation that Bloch has suggested influenced the transformation of Europe from slavery to serfdom (Bloch 1947:34, 44; also Verlinden 1955:731-744). That transformation, furthered above all by the eighth-century ruler Charlemagne, laid the foundation for a rise in the density of the indigenous population as new technologies and crops revolutionized agriculture. Also important was the well known shift in trade routes; the Carolingian Franks turned to the North Sea, their links to the Mediterranean being momentarily severed.

Ideological change contributed to the transformation from slavery to serfdom, as the Christian Church, through conciliar declarations, modified its earlier, unqualified support for slavery. With time it was said that slaves equaled masters in the eyes of God, even if original sin made slavery on earth inevitable. Monastic institutions offered asylum to escaped slaves and were active in manumission, sometimes acquiring their own serfs in this way. In addition, the rescue or salvation of a slave became a frequent biographical detail in the lives of medieval saints. Yet the Church as a whole remained conservative on the issue of inequality, and many of its own clergy owned slaves (Bloch 1947:30-32, 38; Verlinden 1955:702-705). More consistent was the Church's position on the export trade. Long before European princes and kings felt independent enough of Mediterranean luxuries to consider it, ecclesiastical councils were legislating against the movement of slaves abroad. Enslave- ment to a Christian master was distinguished from enslavement to Jews or Moslems, or the shipment via intermediaries-Jews, Syrians, Vikings, and others-to Byzantium (Bloch 1947:39; Verlinden 1944:674-680).

The Church reinforced its opposition to the slave trade through an emphasis on conversion, insisting, for example, that Slavs be Christianized as a way of removing their souls from Moslem (or Byzantine) domain. This group's particular vulnerability to enslavement was suggested by their very name. The culmination of the Church's conversion policy came with the Crusades, a series of holy wars financed by Italian merchants and the Papacy, and joined by kings and princes, which contrasted dramatically with earlier raids for slaves (Bloch 1947:167). Crusading knights, mounted on heavy horses that the agricultural revolution had made possible, put up a defense against Islam and eventually entered even Con- stantinople to plunder its riches. On another equally significant front, in Germany and eastern Europe, crusaders conquered pagan populations and settled them on the land as serfs, at one and the same time reducing the reservoirs of human capital available to the Near East and preparing a future breadbasket for the West. If the reorientation of trade under Carolingian rulers was a turning point in European history, then the Crusades of the twelfth century were the moment when, after much trial and error and many reversals, but with the help of a steadily rising population, a backward and dependent hinterland became organized for its own development (Doehaerd 1946).

Ultimately, development meant more than war and religious conversion, however. It meant manufactures-to replace some of the imports against which slaves were moving and to use in lieu of slaves or bullion in foreign exchange. The most significant manufacture was woolen (as opposed to silk) cloth, which reached markets and crusaders' colonies as far afield as Romania, the Levant, and North Africa-areas that renewed trade with Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Bernard 1972:288; Doehaerd 1946:36-43, 75). Since Roman times, wool-producing sheep were known to thrive in the moist temperate




climate of the North Atlantic and, although mulberry trees could be cultivated outside of a Mediterranean habitat, silkworms died in the northern latitudes. Pirenne suggested another dimension of the north European commitment to wool rather than silk when he described the woolen cloaks that Charlemagne sent as gifts to an Arab sheik. To offer silk cloth to an Oriental monarch was like "carrying water to the river" (Pirenne 1909:310, n.2).

By the time of the First Crusade in 1095, the region of Flanders in the southern Low Coun- tries had emerged as the major European center of high quality wool manufacture and ex-

port. Its towns and cities (Ghent, Douai, Ypres, Bruges, for example) were closely clustered and large sized for the period, with populations ranging from thirty thousand to fifty thousand by the fourteenth century (Smith 1967:304). Their location provided direct access to the estuaries of important, navigable rivers; to the towns of Champagne, in northern

France, where Mediterranean merchants, travelling up the Rhone and Sa6ne valleys, ar- rived on a regular basis to exchange their wares; and to English wool, the finest in Europe, and a necessary import once the growth of population and industry began to press on Flemish sheep. Textile manufacturing was concentrated in these urban centers of which some seventeen formed a trading alliance in the late twelfth century.

Flanders, however, did not monopolize woolen manufacturing. Towns and cities in

northern France, Germany, Languedoc, and Catalonia put textiles into regional trade. In the

fourteenth century, an export-oriented, quality cloth industry grew up at the source of the

raw material in the English countryside, encouraged by migrating Flemish craftsmen whom

Edward III enticed into the realm (de Poerck 1951:15-17; Doehaerd 1946: 100-104). More

serious was the competition from industries in northern and central Italy, whose growth was also in part the work of migrant Flemings (Smith 1967:361, 377-378). Like Flanders, Italy

imported English wool, becoming so involved in this trade that "by 1273 the Florentines

alone were taking some 12 percent of the exported English clip" (Smith 1967:360). In 1277,

Genoese carracks opened an Atlantic route to London and Southampton, making English wool sufficiently accessible to Italy that Florence, where manufacturing developed most

fully, could produce nearly 100,000 lengths of cloth a year in the early fourteenth century

(Bernard 1972:296; Smith 1967:361). When the growth of English industries intensified the

competition for this wool, however, Italian manufacturers increasingly turned to Spain and

spurred the diffusion of pastoral enterprises across virtually all of Castille, where the

merino sheep provided a fine wool, different from the short English fleece, but almost its

rival in quality. Spanish wool was also important to the Low Countries where, as older, established industries declined, new ones formed. The new industries, especially, imported

Spanish wool. Of crucial significance for this essay is the fact that Flemish cloth did not exhibit the

polychrome splendor for which Constantinople was famous, whereas Italian cloth did. In

Florence, the Arte Della Calimala, or dyers' guild, was founded in 1212, but cloth manufac-

ture reached significant proportions only toward the end of the thirteenth century (de

Poerck 1951:15; Heers 1971:1095). Thus, manufacturing establishments were located near

pre-existing dyeing and finishing establishments-a pattern that did not prevail in the north

where access to quality wools seems to have been more important in industrial location

(see Power 1941). Trade routes, of course, influenced concentrations of textile manufacture

everywhere, but the routes that converged on Italy carried the most prestigious dyestuffs. In close articulation with Italian merchants through the Champagne Fairs of the twelfth

century, Flemish drapers imported dyes to supplement local colorants and exported cloth

of blue, green, brown, and a black known as violace (Boissonnade 1964:171-172; Heers

1971:1109-1110; Smith 1967:371). Yet the bulk of Flemish cloth was shipped as grays, or

blancs, for dyeing and finishing in Italy, to the profit of Italian dyers and merchants who

reexported it (Doehaerd 1946:100; Nicholas 1968:458; Reynolds 1929; Smith 1967:360;

Vaczy 1960:20).




the geographical distribution of dyes and dyers

To understand the adoption of black dress as a key symbol of Europe's divergence from older civilizations, we must first discover why Flemish cloth was not made in a full array of colors. I think that an important reason was the world distribution of specialized, skilled

dyers and effective dyestuffs. Unlike staining cloth, dyeing is a chemical process that alters the structure of the fibers so that the color will not wash out or fade from exposure. Before the invention of coal tar dyes in the nineteenth century, very few substances in nature produced anything better than fugitive colors on cloth. The substances were prepared through lengthy, difficult, and obnoxious elaborations. To obtain a small vial of saffron, for exam-

ple, it was necessary to collect stamens from hundreds of crocus plants (Leggett 1944:43-44). The royal purple of Byzantium and ancient Rome was made in vats in which the adectral glands of thousands upon thousands of small whelk-like mollusks, the Murex or Purpura shellfish, decomposed and putrified, secreting a yellowish and foul-smelling li-

quid that, when exposed to the sun, yielded tones that ranged from rose to dark violet

(Conklin 1973:935; Pellew 1918; Singer 1956, Vol. 11:367). Kermes, famous for giving clear

bright reds on wool and silk, were none other than the little globules of a pregnant female insect's secretion, which women collected from the leaves of evergreen oaks and shrubs. Each globule contained worm larvae, hence "vermillion." Escaping worms were killed, rolled into balls, and dried for future use (Linthicum 1963:7). The globules looked like ber- ries and were so small that in English they were called "grains" (from which the word "in-

grained"). One pound of kermes contained about seventy thousand grains (Pellew 1918). According to Leggett, Spain paid half its tribute to Rome in kermes (Leggett 1944:72-76).

The most important European dyes, woad and madder, came from the leaves and roots of plants, respectively. Both had to be ground in mills, and woad processing, in particular, involved a host of specialists, mediators, and merchants (Espinas 1923, Vol. 11:317-318). Small, hand-kneaded balls of woad took nine weeks to ferment and gave off a smell so

disgusting that Queen Elizabeth would not allow woad processing within a five-mile radius of her residences (Baker 1965:160-164).

Dyeing cloth required other ingredients as well. To facilitate the chemical reaction that fixed color in fibers, dyestuffs needed mordants, the most common of these being aluminum sulphate. Shades of a color varied with the type of mordant used, as well as with the fiber. Processors also purified alum to remove from it iron salts that darkened the cloth; they did this initially with stale urine, containing ammonium carbonate, and later by causing solutions of alum to crystallize. According to Singer, "alum was the first substance to ever be prepared in what chemists would call a substantially pure state" (Singer 1956, Vol. 11:367-369). Additional materials used in dyeing included rancid oils, lye, human or animal urine, and the brine of pickled fish.

Vat-dyed cloth, the most common type, was immersed in successive baths, usually over several months. Special recipes guided the craftsman at every step as he combined the dyes, mordants, and other ingredients. Almost by definition, dyers were in possession of

unique skills and closely guarded secrets; as a result they acquired more economic muscle than most medieval craftsmen. Dyeing, a critical subsidiary process in the textile industry, was often the greatest cost factor in production (Chamberlin 1967:93; Kisch 1964; Wilson 1965:69-79). Although some dyers were wage earners, master craftsmen also had small in- vestments in the specialized installations necessary to their art. Some of them traded in dyestuffs and other ingredients, maintained highly valued inventories of expensive goods, and became so affluent that they were able to lend money at interest, purchase property, and, in general, show a closer resemblance to capitalists than to laborers. Dyers were the elite of cloth manufacture (Allix and Gibert 1956:5960; Becker and Brucker 1956:101; de Roover 1968:302; Espinas 1923, Vol. 11:716).




Dyers also enjoyed a favored, if somewhat precarious, position in the political life of medieval towns and kingdoms. Because of their knowledge and skills, competing rulers attempted to attract them with offers of privileges and exemptions, while towns and cities that already had established dyeworks had to treat their dyers well to discourage them from going elsewhere. Yet dyers also had to be controlled, if only because their monopoly of skills gave them latitude to adulterate their work. Numerous medieval laws regulating retail trade offer indirect evidence that dyers could produce handsome fabrics that turned into rags upon washing (see Cole 1964:145-147; La Force 1964:358, for later examples). Surveillance was complicated by the location of dyeworks at the edge of population centers, where combustible materials and foul smells were less of a public nuisance. Sometimes, perhaps especially in periods of economic crisis, dyers were distrusted to the point where they were challenged to migrate or were sent into exile.

Through migration, imitation, allurement, and exile, textile centers all over Europe eventually acquired large-scale dyeworks, but this did not happen in a significant way until the Reformation period. Before the sixteenth century, skilled specialists in the art of dyeing were concentrated, for the Old World, in Asia and the Mediterranean. For example, S.D. Goitein's analysis of the Geniza documents left by Near Eastern Jewish communities of the tenth through thirteenth centuries reveals that Jewish craftsmen "were prominent in the textile industry-above all, in silk work, as well as in dyeing, which was a pronouncedly Jewish profession in all countries and in which they were thought to have professional secrets" (Goitein 1967, Vol. 1:100). We have already noted comparable professionalism in

Constantinople and Florence, both renowned Mediterranean centers of the dyeing and finishing trades.

The concentration of skilled dyers in the Middle Ages reflected the world distribution of

quality dyes and the trade routes through which they circulated. Generally speaking, the

dyes with outstanding reputations for beauty, versatility, and fastness-dyes that would en- dure wind and rain, as well as excessive sunlight-were indigo, murex purple, saffron, kermes, and brazilwood, the latter a source of orange to red shades made from ground, fermented, and boiled wood. All were of oriental or tropical origin. Indigo, for example, was a plant that Europeans could not cultivate. Instead, they depended upon an Indian process in which the leaves were fermented in water, then dried in the air to precipitate a paste for export. Apparently the Romans did not know how to bring this paste into solution and used it as a pigment. The Italians, however, imported indigo extract and learned to dissolve it, using honey and lime (Singer 1956, Vol 11:364-367). Brazilwood was oriental; Venetian merchants imported it from the old port of Gujurat, Cambay, from Ceylon, and from the East Indies (Robinson 1969:29). Saffron, first cultivated in Asia Minor and Persia (although collected wild for carpet dyeing in Central Asia), was brought into Spain by the Arabs and later spread to Tuscany and alpine and transalpine Europe (Leggett 1944:43-44; Robinson 1969:30).5 But kermes, a dye of Indian origin, did not extend, in its western diffusion, beyond a Mediterranean habitat. North Europeans had to import "grains" from Italy and

Spain, together with the rancid olive oil that fixed the dyes. The art of mordanting probably originated in India around 2000 B.C., and the most wide-

ly used mordant, alum, was imported into Europe, first from Asia Minor, and then, after the fall of Constantinople, from alum mines at Tolfa in the Papal State. Not until the seventeenth century did alum mining succeed in England. Moreover, it was Arab writers of the thirteenth century who gave the first evidence of knowing the chemical process by which alum could be purified (Singer 1956, Vol. II: 367 ff.). Finally, the murex shellfish lived only in the warm waters of the eastern Mediterranean and, until it was fished to extinction in the late Middle Ages, its use was restricted to royalty. The imperial title of Byzantium was

"purpureo-genitus"-born to the purple (Pellew 1918). In transalpine Europe, easily cultivated sources of dye were, for blue, woad; for red,




madder; for yellow, several more or less fugitive substances, each objectively inferior to its

oriental/Mediterranean counterpart. In the eighth century, Charlemagne encouraged the cultivation of all of these dyes and their distribution to the female weavers of the manor houses (Latouche 1966:184-185). By the late Middle Ages, several regions such as Picardy, Toulouse, Saxony, and Thuringia had become specialized in the production of woad (Baker 1965: 60-64; Miskimin 1969:32, 57, 61; Latouche 1966:180-185). Yet it was widely known that

indigo produced faster and more beautiful blues than woad-indeed, where available, in-

digo was added to woad baths-while kermes made a clearer and brighter red than madder. Early fourteenth-century account books from a market in southern France show that a cloth called de grana brought 125 livres, whereas a comparable cloth dyed with madder brought only 75 livres (Heers 1971:1111). Arab madder, used with an alum mordant and dried in an open air process precluded by the humidity of the north, gave results that were superior to those of madder in Europe (Leggett 1944:14). Finally, the strict and probably typical rules governing dyers in the export industries of fifteenth century Genoa forbade them to use mediocre colorants such as woad, madder, and certain woods, and even kermes from western, rather than eastern, lands (Heers 1971:1116).

Dyestuffs, in short, were luxury items in the long-distance trade that linked Europe and Asia; in many ways they were equivalent to silks and spices. Indeed, in documents pertaining to this trade, dyes, drugs, and spices were sometimes interchangeable, so that dyers might have pharmaceuticals in their shops and be classified as alchemists, or a quantity of

spices unloaded at a port might actually be a quantity of dyestuffs (Beer 1960). So exten- sively did dyestuffs circulate in the luxury trade that they are sometimes cited among the goods whose scarcity helped motivate the discovery voyages of the fifteenth century. Not only did adventurers seek shorter routes to the treasures of the Orient and search for bullion so that more of these treasures could be bought; but also, according to some historians, the financial backers of the expeditions were interested in dyestuffs. Thus, the land of the Holy Cross became Brazil (after the Arabic brazier, "fiery red"), when "brazilwood," a source of red dye formerly available only from India, was found to be abundant there (Godhino 1950:33; Robinson 1969:30; Singer 1956, Vol. 11:367).

Mediterranean Europe, of course, was in closer and more direct contact with the East- West trade routes of the Middle Ages than was Europe north of the Alps. Jaques Bernard ventures the following generalization: "the Mediterranean did not produce only spices, and northwest Europe was not entirely given over to the production of coarse goods. But it is still a possible simplification to say that, by contrast with the south, the north produced rather the necessities than the luxuries of life" (Bernard 1972:280-281). With regard to tex-

tiles, a consistent pattern differentiated Flanders from northern Italy-the two interacting "poles" of intra-European commerce. Of the two, north Italian cloth producers had easier and more direct access to the significant dyestuffs, whether they were harvested along the shores of the Mediterranean or transhipped, like spices and silks, through Baghdad or Syria, from Asia. As a consequence, skilled dyers and dyers' handbooks became Italian

specialities by the thirteenth century. Flanders was not without dyestuffs, including some of the most reputable acquired from Italian merchants at the Champagne Fairs; and there were highly skilled Flemish dyers too. However, as will become apparent in the following section, Flemish dyers became known, not for a wide range of bright and clear colors, but for their extraordinary success in dyeing wool black.

black in the Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, a close association developed between black robes and the ascetic ideals of the good Christian, ideals that found their highest expression in the celibate order




of Benedictine monks. Monastic asceticism, however, did not remain pure; with time the robes of monks became quite elaborate, although they retained their somber hue. During the Crusades, the humble message of ascetic black took on aggressive overtones; its use by the Knights Templar is one example. According to Norman Cohn, this order provided the Church with its most effective fighting force in the Holy Land and was honored for its valor by Saint Bernard, who had called the First Crusade. The Templar's banner was a piebald of black and white, in which white indicated "gentleness toward the friends of Christ," and black meant "ferocity toward his enemies," above all Islam (Cohn 1975:76). At about the same time, black became "the color of mourning (throughout) Christendom, where, in funeral processions and feasts of mourning ... it marks the scene of graveyards and the

neighborhood of churches and their approaches by the presence of people clad in black" (Fickeler 1962:103).

I hope to show that these various manifestations of black dress constituted an important symbolic aspect of a revolutionary transition that in the medieval period began to reorder the relationship of Europeans to the eastern Mediterranean and Asia. Underlying this thesis is the evidence just presented that brightly dyed textiles were a monopoly of non-Western civilizations and were used by them to extract basic resources, the most telling of which was slaves, from peripheral Europe. Given the impact of polychrome textiles on the balance of trade, one might suppose that they were a danger to any society that could not itself produce reputably dyed cloth. What follows is a brief account of how this condition

might have nurtured the European attachment to black. We begin by noting a generalized distrust of color in European culture. Medieval Chris-

tians abhorred purple and turned it from a color of royalty, as under Byzantium, to a symbol, like black, of penitence, melancholy, and death (Brooke 1967:48-49). They associated red with the tempting devil, while yellow, the color of state robes in Imperial China, signified sensuality and cowardice, and was selected for Judas' dress (Brooke 1967:64). In later centuries, Christians forced Jews to wear yellow badges (Beaulieu and Bayle 1956:143; Rubens 1967:32, 94-110). The word used in Sicilian dialect for bad, corrupt, or evil, is tintu, which also means dyed. The same connection might exist in other European languages and dialects. Certainly it does in English, in which the word "tainted" at one time meant both

dyed and, as it still does today, blemished in an ethical sense-stained with putrefaction, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In English, and perhaps in other languages, mordants used in dyeing were sometimes referred to as "menstrua," a word that may also connote distrust through reference to menstrual blood (for example, Berthollet, an

eighteenth-century writer on the theory of dyeing, quoted in Beer 1960:29). Distrust of color was part of the ascetic code that dominated medieval Christianity and,

above all, its monastic orders. One of these, the Benedictines, is described here. Founded

by Saint Benedict in sixth-century Italy, over the next two hundred years communities of celibate monks multiplied rapidly in the Frankish heartland that ran from Burgundy through Flanders (see map, Catholic Encyclopaedia, p.289). The revolutionary vanguard of their time, these communities cleared forest, improved cultivation, and contributed to the

perfection of numerous crafts (Boissonnade 1964:103,157). Their members were dedicated to hard manual labor and lived by Saint Benedict's Rule. Benedict was not an extreme

ascetic, as were the earliest Christian monks in Egypt; his concern with work precluded austerities that threatened physical fitness and health. Regarding dress, his rule specified that monks wear humble garments. Their robes should be heavy in winter, light in summer, but otherwise should not vary. Of color and size, "monks shall not talk; but they shall be such as can be found in the province where they are or as can be bought the most cheaply" (Benedict 1963:174-180).

According to Tiron's History and Costumes of the Religious Orders, the first Benedictines wore white as a sign of innocence (Tiron 1845:40, 67). Saint Benedict is often pictured in




white, with a black hooded robe, and a well-known detail of his life concerns the time a blackbird, symbolic of the devil, almost lured him to indulge himself with a woman. Never- theless, by the end of the eighth century, black was considered the monastic color par ex- cellence, and several documents pertaining to the Benedictines in subsequent centuries refer to them as nigri monachi-black monks (de Valous 1935, Vol. 1:238). How, while

following a rule that specified no particular colors but insisted on the local provenience and low cost of clothes, did the Benedictine monks become identified with black-the col- or of the bird that had morally tormented their saint? There are two possible answers: one that they wore robes of undyed wool whose natural color was dark; the other that their clothes were dyed black with inexpensive, local dyestuffs. Both, I think, were true, but at different times.

There is disagreement about whether Saint Benedict intended that the robes of monks should be undyed (Davenport 1948:99). According to de Valous, however, "black ... in the minds of ecclesiastical law makers was natural black . . . and not ... . artificial" (de Valous 1935, Vol. 1:238). He cites pronouncements of several abbots and popes of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries in which monks were reproved for abandoning undyed cloth (de Valous 1935:239-240). The possibility that they had once worn it is consistent with what we know about the color of sheep in the early Middle Ages. One of the most significant changes in the domestication of this animal was its loss of pigmentation through a process of culling flocks. This depigmentation was related to the spread of textile dyeing because dyes (except black) would not take on pigmented wool (Ryder 1969:495). During the Iron

Age, Mediterranean sheep became whiter, as did sheep in England, northern France, and Flanders, where the Romans introduced white breeds whose wool could be used with murex purple (Epstein 1962:292; Ryder 1969:501-511). Subsequent to the fall of Rome, however, the Mediterranean influence contracted, and European sheep became darker. Ryder claims that around A.D. 1000 the wools of North Africa and northern Europe had natural pigmentation (Ryder 1969:510) and that earlier, during the time of Charlemagne, "white sheep were apparently an exception" (Ryder 1964:6). Just how dark these pigmented wools were is another question; most accounts suggest that they varied from a grayish white through many shades of brown to dark grays and black. Yet even if black did not predominate, naturally colored wools were distinctive for their somber tone, particularly when contrasted with the brilliant silks of Byzantium. That somber tone was symbolic of commitment to local goods, as prescribed by Saint Benedict.

Between the agricultural improvements carried out under Charlemagne and the call for crusading armies to move against Islam (and eventually Byzantium), the dress of Benedic- tine monks, whatever its precise color, became less austere. It seems a reasonable hypothesis that this change was closely connected not only with the increased size and complexity of the monastic orders, but also with the development of textile manufacturing in Flanders and with the associated transition from a defensive to an offensive stance on the part of Europeans vis-a-vis the East. Austere clothes amounted to a total boycott of luxuries. If followed to its logical conclusion, such an austerity program would have eliminated altogether the domestic market for cloth. The elaboration of dark robes evolved out of and replaced this negativistic stance with a positive one that used textiles ex- travagantly. Of principal importance was the indigenous source of these textiles; they were "made in Europe."

As early as the ninth century in Burgundy and Flanders, a trend began to consolidate around a ritualization of monastic life, the introduction of greater uniformity into the lives of monks, and a shift in the emphasis of monasticism from manual labor to psalm reading and intercession for the souls of the dead. Concomitantly, the dress of monks changed to reflect their increased wealth and leisure. Although probably still undyed, habits became more complex. No longer woven in the monasteries or by peasant women who were at-




tached to the monasteries, they were made of purchased cloth, primarily Flemish. Accord- ing to the new standard regulations, robes, especially choir robes, were to be pleated, long to the ankles, and wide enough to allow freedom of movement. Monk's cloth was therefore larger than other cloths. Representatives of the dominant abbeys inspected local monasteries to discover if monks were punished with so many days bread and water for refusal to wear these cumbersome frocks, as well as for the opposite sin of keeping dyed cloth and other items of luxury. Inspectors could denounce lenient abbots to the bishop. The number of frocks also multiplied. Whereas Saint Benedict's Rule specified one tunic and cowl at a time, monks of the ninth century received two. They also wore linen underwear (a reflection of and a spur to the expanding linen industry in Flanders), sandals, lined boots, and fur pelisses-apparel that the sixth-century rule did not mention (Dulcy 1934:79; Schmitz 1948; de Valous 1935, Vol. 1:230-235, 241-242).

Interrupted by the Viking invasions, the Benedictine movement of elaboration was renewed with the tenth-century construction of the great abbey at Cluny in Burgundian France, replete as it was with European-made stained glass windows, silver chalices, and rich ornamentation. In the forefront of ritualization and embellishment of ascetic themes, Clunaic monks virtually abandoned manual labor and filled their time (still fearful of idleness) with psalm singing and intercession. Benedict prescribed the singing of forty psalms each day, but the choral monks at Cluny sang 170 (Rosenwein and Little 1974:7). In addition they made ceremonies out of walking, dressing, sitting, and eating, and invented a secret sign language. Besides wearing underwear, monks now slept on linen sheets and laundered their linen every two weeks in summer, in winter every three. A new officer of the abbey, the chamberlain, supplied their clothing needs and became so important a func-

tionary that he gradually assumed control over the brotherhood's finances (Evans 1968:70-79; Hunt 1967:58-59, 79-80).

Saint Benedictine said that monks might give their clothes to the poor when there was still a little wear left in them, but he never intended what became standard practice by the eleventh century: by then monks received gifts of a new robe every Christmas and a new

cape and cowl every other year.6 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the practice spread of giving monks a clothing allowance (in English called a "wage") so that they could

shop for fabrics on their own (Knowles 1948:288-289). Like courtly cloth, religious cloth was commissioned (Espinas, Vol. II: 288-289). According to a fourteenth-century register, it cost about as much to clothe the monks at Cluny as to feed them and their numerous guests (de Valous 1935, Vol. 1:248). Clearly, "black" monasticism, which had also vastly expanded in a numerical sense, kept many hundreds of European weavers employed.

By the thirteenth century, if not before, the Black Monks also gave work to dyers, in part because the Crusades enriched the monasteries, but perhaps also in part because European sheep were turning white again. With the further development of Flemish industries, and

especially with the expansion of textile dyeing in Florence, sheep raisers began to improve their breeds in response to industrial demand (Duby 1968:145-146). The most enterprising among them belonged to the new Cistercian order that had broken away from the Benedic- tines in 1098. In revolt against the "decadence" of Cluny, the Cistercians preached a return to manual labor, and their dedication contributed to the "orderly and planned expansion" of sheep husbandry in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Trow-Smith 1950:67-79, also 1953:51-53). Consolidating scattered holdings into large farms and opening up granging districts in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, and on the Continent, this order culled its flocks with an

eye to Flemish and north Italian consumers and allowed its rams to be used for breeding elsewhere. According to Eileen Power, the Cistercians displayed the spirit of "improving landlords" of the eighteenth century (Power 1941:20-26; also Verhulst 1972:301-313). As a

symbol of their "puritan" ethos, they stripped away clunaic elaborations, replacing stained with plain glass and silver chalices and crosses with pewter and wood. They also returned




to the letter of Saint Benedict's Rule regarding dress by giving up extra robes, undergarments, and sleepwear. Significantly, their undyed tunics were white or gray, although they covered them with black capes when outside the monastery; and the Cister- cians became known as the White Monks of Europe (Dickinson 1962:72-73; Evans 1968: 44-45). Their influence, together with that of lay landholders in the granging districts, must have made it increasingly difficult to acquire undyed black wool.

Whatever the reasons for an increase in the use of dyed black garments, there is no question but that, like other elaborations of ascetic dress, the change depended upon local raw materials and local craftsmen. Mediocre black hues were readily obtainable from charcoal, cinders, iron filings, and the bark of oak trees, rich in tannin. Woad, especially when combined with madder, dyed a black that no oriental substance could surpass, and Flanders was rich in both woad and madder (Espinas 1923, Vol. 1:25-26). Its dyers were categorized according to the dyestuffs and processes they used, and a category known as corroyeurs specialized in finishing cloth and dyeing it black. Regulations forbade members of this category to use inferior materials and to mix the bark process, or iron filings, with woad (Coornaert 1930:196; Espinas 1923, Vol. 11:150). Thanks to this level of quality control, Flemish black was the best black in Europe, and black was a better color than any other made in Flanders (Baxandall 1972:15). Moreover, one could wear Flemish black, even of the highest quality, and still remain within the spirit, if not the letter, of Saint Benedict's Rule. That rule enjoined adherents to sacrifice worldly pleasures, but because it assumed that worldliness was closely related to the conspicuous consumption of exotic and expensive luxuries, its prohibitions were directed mainly at foreign wares. In contrast to polychrome textiles, black cloth was brought to perfection through a developmental process internal to Europe itself. In the sixteenth century the Council of Trent acknowledged this fact by making "artificial" or dyed black cloth the prescribed color of monastic and clerical dress (de Valous 1935, Vol. 1:238).7

In the foregoing pages I have attempted to demonstrate continuity between the austere dress of early monks and later elaborations: both repelled brightly colored garments that were often, if not always, imported. In this sense both were symbolic of the sacrifices that necessarily accompany indigenous growth and development; both gave off a message of restraint. They differed in what they communicated about human equality, however. In austere black there was so little scope for variation that those who wore it must have looked the same. Later elaborations, even though they depended primarily upon locally available resources, permitted distinctions of texture, size, cut, and embroidery, which became markers of social status. Next, I wish to examine the relationship of these conclu- sions to another instance of black dress that became widespread in the Middle Ages: its use in mourning. Rather than focus on the logical reasons why black might stand for death-reasons that are problematic because the association is not universal-I will emphasize how closely the concept of death characteristic of the medieval period articulated with the spirit of sacrifice that, both in its austere and elaborate forms, was symbolized by black.

Medieval Europeans broke with earlier civilizations in which rulers and nobles were buried with treasure and thought to be immortal. Instead, they pessimistically portrayed death as an egalitarian state in which everyone was judged on the basis of inner, rather than outward, signs of worth. Indeed, lay noblemen frequently chose to be buried in monastic dress. As their civilization developed, however, this austere view of death became embellished with ritual and gradually lost its egalitarian thrust. Symptomatic of the change was the way the Clunaic monks and other segments of the ecclesiastical establishment took charge of peoples' souls and monitored their progress through the increasingly important limbo between heaven and hell known as purgatory (Boase 1972). Worried about the day of judgment, people of wealth bequeathed land to the Church as a




down-payment on salvation; some of them entered monasteries with all of their possessions before dying (Rosenwein and Little 1974:13). In addition, surviving kinfolk paid for special masses to be sung for a deceased relative, not only immediately following death but also for many years thereafter. By implication, a poor man's chances of salvation were less than those of a rich man, notwithstanding the doctrine laid down in scripture that it is harder for the rich to enter heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. And the rich took courage, as when the Count of Macon obtained a special dispensation from the Abbot of Cluny to wear soft linen under his rough monk's habit, which he thought would be unbearable, even in death (Hunt 1967:95), or when the corpses of Venetian nobles were "dressed with ostentatious humility in the simple robes of a friar" (Davis 1975:50).

Like elaborations of monastic dress, the evolution of the concept of death not only reflected but also contributed to the growth of an aggressive civilization in Europe. For ex-

ample, bestowals of land in exchange for salvation helped to finance crusaders who en-

larged territorial boundaries and captured a commercial foothold in the Near East. Such bestowals also helped transform monastic life from an emphasis on manual labor to an em-

phasis on singing and prayer, the more so as donated land came already "fully organized and staffed with the necessary working personnel, i.e., ... 'clothed', as the phrase went, with men and beasts" (Duby 1968:70). Thanks to such donations, monks were relieved of the trouble of reclaiming waste lands and could live a life of ease like great lords (Duby 1968:70). We have already seen how caught up they became in the conspicuous consumption of European manufactures. In a way fear of the Devil, when it led to Church donations, ensured that accumulated wealth would be cycled back through the European economy, rather than be dissipated in the purchase of imported silks and spices. Burial in dark woolen cloth communicated this ordering of priorities as did the importance attached to being "buried in the soil of one's own country"-a symbolic recycling of the body that was of

particular significance during the Crusades (Huizinga 1954:143-144). Elaborations on the theme of death, on funerary ritual, and psalm singing for departed

souls increased to the point that when the plagues of the fourteenth century began to reduce population drastically, daily life became macabre. Yet in the midst of excessive elaboration, there was a line of continuity to early medieval asceticism. Huizinga's description of plague-ridden Burgundy shows that emphasis fell on two ideas. One was great joy over salvation of the soul that wealth more or less ensured, but the other concerned the

earthy side of death: decomposition of the body and worm-infested bowels served as reminders that glory, fame, and exotic luxuries were but temporary badges of status, des- tined to be irrelevant in the hereafter (Huizinga 1954:138-151). If black dress was an appropriate symbol of an austere death, then elaborate black dress and funerary parapher- nalia were appropriate compromises as incipient development intensified social stratification and made such elaboration possible. Without being able to trace the steps by which black replaced white as the color of mourning, we can hypothesize that its increased use for this purpose reinforced its role as a symbol, not so much of death as of pious self- restraint.8

Renaissance peacocks and penguins

In the two centuries that followed the revolutionary medieval period, the use of black dress persisted and took on an even greater variety of forms. Among these was the regal black that clothed the inner circle of certain devoutly Catholic courts such as that of Philip the Good in Burgundy and Philip II in Spain. Black dress also spread among Protestants, whose attitudes towards color ranged from rejection of all finery implicitly or explicitly thought to be polychrome to a positive valuation of well-cut black attire. The messages be-




ing communicated, diverse as they were, again had a common denominator and were con- tinuous with the Benedictine message of the Middle Ages. Again, commonality need not be attributed to logic; nor do I think that continuity in the meaning of black dress between two or more historical periods can be explained by "cultural lag." Explanation for continuity across periods, and for commonality across diverse social groups and classes, is to be

sought, rather, in the persistence and generality of particular historical processes, in this case, the processes by which centers of polychrome textile manufacture appropriated critical resources from a textile importing hinterland and thereby provoked a wide range of reactions in this already differentiated and class-stratified sphere.

This said, our attention must shift to the new ways in which these processes began to un- fold in the Renaissance period, for if the hegemony of Byzantium and Islam was a starting point in our analysis of the Middle Ages, the expansion of another nexus of power, this one internal to Europe itself, became decisive in the fourteen hundreds. The towns and cities of northern and central Italy, plus the Papal court at Rome, constituted the significant civilizational center for Europe north of the Alps.

Renaissance Italy was heir to Byzantium above all in its success with silk manufacture. Arab conquests had brought the mulberry-eating silkworm to Spain and Sicily well before the First Crusade and, in the late thirteenth century, aided by the Mongol pacification of the trans-Asian silk route, silk rearing and silk weaving spread into Tuscany, where Lucca and other towns produced silk cloth. In the next century and a half, manufacturing extended to all the major cities of Italy-Genoa, Venice, Florence, Milan, Bologna. As competition for wool became serious with the rise of English industries in the fourteenth century, the emphasis in Italian textiles shifted from wool to silk, and it was this fine, oriental fiber, rather than western wool, that underwrote Italian expansion (Heers 1971:1093). Of all the European regions to flourish in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Flanders, Burgundy, and Valois Paris included), the Italian regions of Lombardy and Tuscany came closest to reproducing on western soil, and with western modifications, the splendor of the oriental civilization of Byzantium.

Italian textiles, whether silk or wool, were no less polychrome than the luxuries of Con- stantinople. Well-serviced by long-distance trade routes carrying exotic dyestuffs, Renaissance Italy virtually exploded with color. Among its peacock themes were particolored garments in which the sleeves were of contrasting colors, the pants legs also, and the body of still another color. Garments, now intricately tailored, were slashed with hundreds of cuts to reveal a different color layer underneath. Variations in color made it possible for individuals to design their own clothes, and court fashion "changed with a rapidity which had been unknown before" (Chamberlin 1967:52-56). For the first time since the fall of Rome, reds and purples surfaced to mark off not only courtiers and royalty from the less prestigious social ranks, but the merchant elite as well.

There were a few exceptions. The Medici ruler of Florence, the first wool town, retained the long dark robe of the Middle Ages. In Venice, noblemen retained the black wool garments that had earlier become the standard of their class, as this city, in order to ascend to commercial preeminence in the Mediterranean, furthered a posture of modesty and sobriety in relation to the multitude of foreign vessels filled with exotic cargoes clogging its lagoons and canals (Molmenti 1880:96-106, 275, 282, 365). Another type of exception is suggested by an early fifteenth-century death inventory from a rural area near Genoa, according to which the local lord possessed 22 pieces of black drap, as against 18 green, 9 brown or gray, 7 white, 6 red, and 3 blue. "Black, so rare outside of mourning, among the noble merchants of the city, more often dressed the nobles of the fief" (Heers 1971:1105). Where merchants chose to hide their wealth in order to inspire confidence, black sometimes dressed them too; merchants in Venice are a noteworthy example (Molmenti 1880:276). Finally, pious saints like Bernard of Sienna expressed dismay at the new extravagances. But




the exceptions did not set the tone and were soon eclipsed by the colorful styles and "frenetic" search for novelty that so engaged men and women of the upper stratum in Renaissance towns and cities (Heers 1971:1097-1098).

With a few exceptions, transalpine Europe, cut off from direct access to superior dyes, faded by comparison. English producers, in particular, did poorly with color even though dyestuffs were among their country's principal imports (Thrupp 1966:270). "At this daye," said the designer of a sixteenth-century project for dyeing cloth in England, "any-one who can afford it wyll not meddle with any cloth that is dyed within this realm-Our ignorant dyers . . . washe awaye and poure downe the gutters well most as muche [dye] as they cast

awaye upon the cloth." Yet colors are "necessary to the English nation...." Without them "we enrich strangers and impoverish our countrymen" (quoted in Tawney and Power

1965:130-149). A royal statute of 1552 enumerated as true, rather than false and deceivable, the follow-

ing hues: scarlet, red, crimson, and then a host of nondescript shades including brown-blue, orange-tawney, russet, marble, sheep's color, lion's color, motley or iron gray, something called "new sad color" and something called "puke" (Linthicum 1963:11). The latter, unrelated to present usage, was an inky blue-black, made from boiling wool with galls and then copperas (copper sulphate). The criticism of English dyers quoted above extended to their use of rynes, barks, galls, and copperas "afterwarde floryshed up with a shewe of

disceptfull brasell" to produce black, rather than using woad and madder as in Flanders and France. "Thereby they take great hyre for slender coste" (quoted in Tawney and Power

1965:130-149). Not mentioned by the statute, but produced at the time, were other miserable shades (whose names invited a different kind of symbolic analysis than the one

pursued here): rat's color (a dull gray), horse flesh (bronze, like the hide of bay horses), and

gooseturd, a yellowish green (Linthicum 1963:33-36). One quickly grasps the state of dyeing from William Harrison's list of colors, claimed by his 1587 Description of England to have been devised "to please fantastical heads." This list includes devil in the hedge (an off- shade of red) and pease porridge tawny as well as gooseturd green (Harrison 1968:148).

Mid-sixteenth-century England was noted, not for color, but for the export of uniformly

undyed or "sadly" dyed cloth of wool. The main foreign markets for this cloth were in the

Baltic and eastern Europe. Merchants who carried it to India feared their ships would "rot

in the river" if they persisted in the trade. In India great men used English broadcloth to

cover their elephants and horses (Fisher 1950:157). This caused a sixteenth-century observer

to lament that when, two hundred years earlier, England had graduated from the export of

raw wool to the export of cloth, it had gone but halfway in the development of its

economy: the export of undyed or poorly dyed cloth being an "imperfect thing." Only a ful-

ly manufactured export (because it was more likely than most semifinished goods to sur-

vive foreign competition) could solve the problems of turnover, profit, and stable employment in industry (Friis 1927:281; Wilson 1965:69-79).

Renaissance Italy exported polychrome textiles, plus cloth of silver and gold, to destinations in transalpine Europe, including England. Italian merchants also transhipped oriental

silks and spices to the same destinations. The exchange commodities differed somewhat from those of the Middle Ages. Whereas Byzantium and Moslem Spain encouraged Euro-

pean involvement in the slave trade, Renaissance merchants made transalpine Europe a

source of precious metals instead.10 Modest amounts of bullion had come to Europe during the Crusades as a consequence of plunder. More important were nonbase metals extracted

from the mountains and hills of south and central Germany, Bohemia, Silesia, and

Hungary. According to John Nef, between 1450 and 1530 the annual silver output of central

European mines increased fivefold and reached a peak that was not approached again until

the nineteenth century (Nef 1941b; see also Hodgett 1972:157-160). Whatever the sources of bullion-later it came from America-north Europeans keenly felt its loss. Gold and




silver were essential elements in the formation of states, the creation of bureaucracies, and the recruitment of mercenary soldiers; and from the mid-fourteenth century, rulers as well as populace "complained bitterly about the drain of precious metals by Italy ... largely the

counterpart of the drain from Italy into the Levant" (Lopez, Miskimin, and Udovitch

1970:101-128). Italian hegemony, and demand for bullion, was not spread evenly, however; it advanced,

as Braudel has suggested, "along narrow channels running northwards with the great trade routes" (Braudel 1972, Vol.1:223). The main cluster of these routes transversed a corridor or "isthmus" that lay between eastern France on one side, Hungary and Poland on the other, and stretched as far north as England and Scandinavia. To the west of this corridor, in France and Spain, centralizing monarchies had successfully warded off excessive Italianization and diverted the oppressive fiscal demands of the papacy onto "less united and stable countries like Germany" (Dickens 1966:35). As a result, the bulk of the Mediter- ranean trade went over the alpine passes and up the Rhine. Everywhere it penetrated, it stimulated a local economy to new levels of production and exchange, and to increased outflows of bullion. "Geographers talk of a catchment area of a river; here there was a catchment of many trades by the quick flowing rivers of money to the profit of financiers in Genoa and Florence" (Braudel 1972, Vol.1:386,393). That the balance of trade was un- favorable to the north was "wholly to be expected"; in spite of it, northern merchants and artisans were "as if under apprenticeship, looking for guidance to the towns of the South"

(Braudel 1972, Vol. 1:215). In England this situation led to a series of anti-Italian riots in the fifteenth century (Myers 1963:73,159-162; also see Holmes 1960 on Florentine merchants in

London). The geography of Italian hegemony in the Renaissance period offers a clue to the com-

plex distribution of colors in the cultural landscape, a distribution not readily correlated with lines of cleavage between rich and poor, north and south, or even between Protestants and Catholics. The appearance of the penguin was frequent, but as it crossed religious and class lines, it took different forms in different groups and opposed in different ways the Italianized peacock themes that dazzled all. Only a set of processes that includes ineq- uities in the balance of trade, as well as in the internal allocation of wealth and power, comes close to explaining the color choices of the period. (Such a set of processes, inciden-

tally, also helps clarify some special features of the corridor of Italian expansion, for example, the difficulties later experienced by this area in state formation.)

One manifestation of penguin symbolism was the "black court"; the ducal court of Burgundy is a good example. It rivaled the court of the French king as a center not only of

power and wealth, but also of lavish hospitality and feasting. Its ruler in the fifteenth century, Philip the Good, was a true magnate, with thirty mistresses and many illigitimate children. Like his predecessors, he surrounded himself with vessels and ornaments of gold and silver that he displayed as proof of the fortitude of his armies. Rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and ostrich feathers adorned his hats and robes, some of which were made from fine Italian and oriental silks that bore exotic names like damasquins, maurisques, and tar- taires (Beaulieu and Bayle 1956:27). Yet the good Duke Philip was an advocate of sober dress. He and his courtiers characteristically wore long black robes, neither tailored nor ad- justed, neither buttoned nor laced, and were attended by livery that was also dressed in black (Beaulieu and Bayle 1956; Heers 1971:1098; Vaughn 1970).

Many assume that Philip wore black to mourn his father's assassination by political enemies, yet other dimensions of his choice indicate that courtly black went beyond a symbol of death. By virtue of his grandfather's marriage to the daughter of the Count of Flanders, plus his own acquisitions through marriage and war of Luxembourg, Brabant, and Holland, Philip was ruler of the Low Countries. His residence being there, he was inevitably embroiled in the territorial disputes between France and England known as the Hundred




Years War, and his need for a war chest full of bullion was no less than the need of kings. Since the late fourteenth century, merchant bankers of Lucca had floated generous loans to the House of Burgundy, but to depend too heavily on this source of financing was to run the risk of an increased Italian role in state affairs. The existence of prosperous textile industries in his northern territories permitted Philip to implement a more autonomous "bullionist" policy that from 1430 led to bans on the import of English cloth and the export of silver and gold. These bans, which expressed a union of interests between the duke and the wool towns, coincided with the court's adoption of gray and black, which can also be dated to 1430 (Beaulieu and Bayle 1956:29; Munro 1972). The choice of black probably symbolized allegiance to these towns that, in an earlier period, had led all of Europe in the

development of a woad and madder process for dyeing wool black. In addition to communicating allegiance to Flemish industries, the black robes of the

Burgundian court may have mattered to them in a practical sense. For, although they were

plain, these robes were reputed to be of enormous width, "cutting the finest Netherlandish fabrics wastefully on the cross" (Baxandall 1972:14-15; Davenport 1948:335). Mourning dress, in fact, revealed both the status of the wearer and his relationship to the deceased by the number and fullness of folds. It is thus of interest to discover in Beaulieu and Bayle's study of the ducal accounts, that, except for cloth of silk and gold purchased from Lucca

merchants, the Burgundian court requisitioned fabrics almost exclusively from Flanders.

Furthermore, the pieces that were not properly Flemish came from nearby Normandy and Brabant (Beaulieu and Bayle 1956:24-36).

Perhaps because he was so closely connected to the region of Europe that had generated the medieval crusades, Philip was more troubled than contemporary rulers by the fall of

Constantinople to Turkish armies in 1453, a triumph of the "Infidel" that he took as a per- sonal insult (Calmette 1963:236; Cartellieri 1929:135-142; Tyler 1971:107-114). At a sump- tuous banquet-the Feast of the Pheasant-held to announce a new crusade, Burgundian and Flemish noblemen wore gray and black, even though their costumes were of damask and silk as well as wool. A dirge concluded the feast and commemorated the Church's loss, but the climax came when knights and duke took vows upon a ritual pheasant. In an almost reckless frenzy, some swore to wear hair shirts and abstain from wine and sleeping in beds until they met a Turk (symbolized by a giant dressed in white and green). As for Philip, he took an oath to engage the Sultan himself in combat. His black costume communicated not only mournfulness and support for Flemish cloth, but a related theme that harked back to the Knights Templar-"ferocity toward the enemies of Christ" (see Cartellieri 1929:92, 141-148; Tyler 1971:66-67).

Draped in black, the Burgundian court diverged from the colorful courts of Italy, where there was little enthusiasm for crusading.1' Indeed, there were no Italians among the artists and artisans patronized by its dukes, who recruited sculptors, tapestry weavers, and craftsmen from Flanders, Brabant, and Holland (Vaughn 1970). Contemporaneously, at another black court in Naples, conservatively dressed courtiers found a different way to turn their backs on north Italian splendor. They jostled the Sienese ambassador so that the gold em-

bossing rubbed off his coat and made it look so bedraggled that the king "could not stop laughing" (quoted in Baxandall 1972:14-15).

Perhaps the best known example of a black court where Italianate luxuries were scorned was the sixteenth-century court of Philip II in Spain; here foreign visitors were only received if properly dressed in black (Braudel 1973:232). Like the Burgundian duke, Philip II inherited the Low Countries by means of an earlier dynastic marriage; he was further tied to Flemish cloth makers through the wool exports of Spain. The black costumes of his court, however, were probably also the symbolic aspect of a nascent Spanish silk industry, advantaged by a New World dye whose importation Spain monopolized from the early sixteenth century. Called logwood, this substance produced a superb black on silks and velvets (Leggett




1944:53; Pellew 1918:20-21). Suggestive of support for home industries, Philip and his cour-

tiers, like the monks at Cluny and the Burgundians just described, consumed no end of

cloth; they changed their clothes often and cast them to the poor when they had been worn little more than once (Davenport 1948:455; Norris 1938, Book II: 404-411). On the whole their outfits consisted of richly embroidered black silks and velvets, offset by plumes and white satin. When Philip died, however, he was (at his own request) buried in a lead coffin and lead shirt (Davis 1970:118-119).

Madrid shared another characteristic with Burgundy-the spirit of the religious crusade; for, while Renaissance Italy remained open to the East-West routes that converged on the Levant and Turkey, Spain became a Mediterranean bulwark against Ottoman expansion (see McNeill 1974). In the course of the sixteenth century, however, the target of its battles shifted as Lutheran infidelity was increasingly considered more heinous than that of the Turks. This raises a fundamental problem for the analysis of black dress symbolism. The ex-

travagant elaborations implied by the expression "Spanish black" presuppose a serious

departure from the ascetic and egalitarian Rule of Saint Benedict. So did the highly ritual- ized Spanish funeral depart from the medieval idea, acted out through burial in monk's

cloth, that all are bodily, if not spiritually, equal in death. Protestant reformers expressed outrage at these distortions of scripture, and as they did so, Spanish armies attacked them

all over Europe. The wars of the Counter-Reformation indicated an even greater contradiction between the black of the Middle Ages and the black of Spain. The resolution of this contradiction lies in the fact that the black garments of Philip II and his courtiers and the black themes that were so pronounced in Counter-Reformation art bespoke a claim to the

leadership of Christendom. The politics of this claim was complex, but not unfamiliar; it resembled other well-known situations in which acts of repression against revolutionaries are carried out in the name of the revolution and with the aid of revolutionary symbols.

A superficial acquaintance with a few black courts suggests that they were located outside the corridor of direct Italian hegemony. In that corridor, running through the Alps and

Germany to England, social dislocations associated with mining and trade were severe, and resistance to polychrome luxuries had a popular cast, being especially characteristic of

groups that were distant from royal courts. These groups were often, although not ex-

clusively, Protestant and many of them participated in the radical wing of the Reformation. In their sermons, Protestants insisted that bright colors were an offense to God and they

sought to draw attention to the "true colors" of virtue-colors that could not be judged by appearances or "works":

Every man has fallen in love with himself ... his mind is set on fashions, fangles and garish clothes ... in the judgment of wise men, such [people] are but a blowne bladder, painted over with so many colours, stuft full of pride and envy ... in whomsoever such [outward] badges of vanitie appears, it is a sure token there is a stinking puddle of vainglory within (Crosse 1878:74-75).

Or again, gay clothes are:

as baites to take men ... as the hyena flattereth when she neareth to kill ... these mermaids may be compared to glorious flowers, that have stinking smells ... in sight lovely and saverous; but in taste most deadly and venimous.... Riches impeach the creator and defile the all om- nipotent workmanship of nature (Crosse 1878:76).

The idea that bright colors masked stinking smells was an old one; Protestants, who

loved to quote scripture, could find it in Isaiah, who said "instead of sweet smell there

should be stink ... burning instead of beauty" (Isaiah 3:23; see also Cohn 1975:35). Nor was

the association between colors and venom unusual; an interesting example is the tale of Snow White. Set in German mining country where the seven dwarfs "dig and delve" for

gold, this tale tells how a vain queen, disguised as a peddler, woos Snow White with bodice laces "of all colours ... made of variegated silks." Her purpose is to kill the girl and eat her




heart. In a second trick, the same queen offers an apple of which "only the red cheeks are

poisonous" (Grimm 1898:159-161). Two themes repeatedly appeared in attacks on Renaissance fashion, particularly in areas

where Protestantism took hold. One was moral and the other economic, having to do with the balance of trade. More often than not, they were expressed together. Thus, the

fifteenth-century English king Edward IV declared that "as well men as women wear excessive and inordinate apparel to the great displeasure of God, the enriching of strange realms, and the destruction of this realm" (quoted in Davenport 1948:190). His contem-

poraries who visited Italy were said to return either horrified or contaminated, and the

Italianized Englishman was nicknamed "devil incarnato"-a play on words because red

solutions, like flesh and meat, were "carnate" (Leggett 1944:76-77; Symonds 1960:370-371). A hundred years later, an Englishman could still protest the "number of trifles [that] come hither from beyond the seas, that we might clean spare, or else make them within our Realm. For the which we ... pay inestimable treasure every year" (quoted in Burn

1846:252). William Harrison agreed, claiming that things were never merrier with England than when "an Englishman was known abroad by his own cloth and contented himself at home with ... coat, gown, and cloak of brown-blue or puke" (Harrison 1968:148). Harrison worried that, their clothes full of jags and cuts and garish colors, "women are become men and men transformed into monsters" (Harrison 1968:147).

South German and alpine politics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries similarly fused moral and economic concerns. Angry at merchants who sent "great sums of good money to

Italy," reformers declared that "cloth made in foreign lands shall not be sold in our

markets," and they advocated clothes of solid colors, a different color each for men and

women (Braudel 1972, Vol. 1:215; Shapiro 1909:16). Both moral and economic criticisms of

ostentation were reflected in municipal sumptuary laws that, although not new, multiplied rapidly in much of Europe after 1400. These laws had as a central purpose the limitation of

purchases to which social pressure and rivalry for status drove citizens, even against their

will, threatening them with financial ruin. Laws touched every category where, as Veblen so well understood, people of wealth competed in conspicuous display: dowries, weddings, funerals, recreation and furniture, as well as clothes. The laws reinforced class distinctions to the extent that they were obeyed and permitted noblemen to indulge in things forbidden to the bourgeoisie (artisans and valets were even forbidden to dress in hand-me-downs; see

Monter 1967:216-217). Public officials also hoped that they would stem gold and silver ex-

ports and protect a high level of employment among politically volatile local craftsmen. A

significant proportion of the luxuries they restricted were of foreign, usually Italian, provenience (Davenport 1948:190; Freudenberger 1973; Greenfield 1918; Hurlock 1965; Vincent

1935). Sumptuary laws often had moralistic preambles, reminiscent in theme of Matthew's

observation that the lilies of the field neither toil nor spin, and yet are more beautiful than

"Solomon in all his glory" (Matthew 6:25-29). The civic leaders who wrote them warned that

God was disgusted by the extent to which foreign ways and frivolous fashion had led to en-

vy, greed, and sexual license; in fact, they attributed crop failures and other disasters to

divine vengeance at these proofs of a fall from grace (Vincent 1935:64, 67). Among the

frivolities they condemned were bright colors, whose use was limited by establishing the

proper number of variegated borders on petticoats and sleeves according to a person's rank

and marital status. In general, maidens were allowed a wider range of chromatic display than matrons or widows, and the same was true for people, men as well as women, of

higher rank (Vincent 1935:43-45). Here, too, moral and economic considerations converged for, as Jaques Heers points out, colors were curtailed not only because they were showy, but "because they were obtained with dyes that were too precious" (Heers 1971:1100-1101).

It should come as no surprise that towns and cities in the path of direct Italian hegemony




during the Renaissance-Reformation period legislated black dress for certain groups: ministers and their families, city councilmen, theological candidates and other students, and ordinary burghers during attendance at church or public ceremonies (Freudenberger 1973:139; Vincent 1935). The black in question was neither flamboyant nor cumbersome, for it was meant to express pursuit of an upright life. Nevertheless, it did not fully conform to Saint Benedict's Rule. Calvinists, who led in its use, requisitioned quality wools and paid much more for tailoring than any monastery could have sanctioned. They also used the ruff for variation, evaluating this piece of "furniture" according to width, fullness, elaborateness of lace, whether it was made of homespun or fine Belgian linen, and whether or not it was pleated with a special crimper (Vincent 1935:58-59; 84). Whereas students and

burghers wore simple collars with their long black robes (from which the academic robe is descended), councilmen decked out for religious holidays could hardly turn their heads for the enormity of their ruffs. Yet Calvinist black remained within the medieval tradition that established the key symbol. According to this tradition, black cloth was a banner to which

Europeans rallied as they coped first with the hegemony of older civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean, and then with the Europeanized, but still Mediterranean, civilization of northern Italy. For some this resistance was couched in the framework of a

military/religious crusade against Islam; for others, however, it took the form of a combined economic and cultural boycott of the luxury trade. In either case, black clothing, symbolic of pious sacrifice and advocacy of indigenous development, served well to

"catalyze feelings" and to communicate goals (see Ortner 1973).12 Between the crusading spirit of sixteenth-century Spain and the boycotts of the Refor-

mation, much of Europe was clad in black. That this color stood for opposition to the tempting but ruinous luxuries of "the East" accounts for the otherwise anomalous fact that both sides in the religious wars adopted it. And so did Jews. Encapsulated in Christian society, Jewish people worried about links that coreligionists had to the luxury trade. Occasionally, Christian regulations governed their dress; more often this was accomplished by sumptuary laws of their own communities. These laws advocated restraint, but less from religious con- viction than to avoid arousing envy in Christians. Like the pochteca of the Aztec state, Jews were "condemned to go about meanly clad in sad-coloured raiment." Parents of children dressed in red or blue risked insult and extortion. Ownership of jewels, silks, and mixed colors was acceptable, but the ostentatious display of them was not, and the long black cloak was prescribed as the best concealment for finery. Black was a statement of conformity in the interests of neutralizing fear, and a way of not flaunting the trade goods that Christians both coveted and repelled (Rubens 1967).

modern penguins

The modern period of European history was initiated by a shift in the geography of textiles as northern Italy ceded preeminence to Holland, the north of France, and England. The story of this shift is long, complicated, and still controversial. For the purposes of this

essay, however, it can be told as the story of "new draperies." These cloths, although varied to the point that generalization is difficult, were commonly light and cheap. At least initial-

ly manufactured of local wools that were longer in staple than fine English wool, they did not have to be fulled. Moreover, the long-staple wool was not carded but was combed to thin out the fibers and to arrange them in parallel rather than crosswise filaments. Sometimes used only for the warp, it could be woven with more traditional wools on the weft. Alternatively, it constituted both warp and weft or was mixed with silk or cotton. However it was woven, the pattern of the weave was visible and the resulting cloth weighed much less than the reversible, heavy, fulled fabrics of the past. Finally, because this cloth




used raw materials sparingly, it cost less to make (Bowden 1962:49, n.2, 53; Coleman

1969:418-423; Wilson 1960:210). It is generally agreed that the new draperies grew out of the "continental search for a

substitute for English wool" after it became scarce in the fourteenth century. The earliest

experiments were probably carried on in Italy, although in the fifteenth century, Flemish

villages (such as Hondschoote), which were near the medieval wool towns, became the most innovative and prosperous centers of new drapery manufacture (Coleman 1969; Rapp 1975:520; Van der Wee 1975). From here the technology spread into Holland and England. In England, the enclosure movement of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries improved the quality of midlands pastures, which, according to Bowden, permitted grangers to breed

larger sheep whose wool had a longer staple. In general, the larger the animal, the longer its wool. Although at first exported to new drapery manufacturers on the continent, this wool

gradually supported the manufacture of light worsteds at home (Bowden 1962). Of special interest were the peacock hues of the new draperies, for unlike medieval

broadcloths, northern cloths of the modern age were dyed and finished at home. Sometimes "dyed in the wool" (that is, before weaving) to produce several colors on the same piece of cloth, they may even have accelerated the rate of fashion change. Manufac- turers of the draperies who evaluated production costs were aware that the decreased

outlay for the raw material wool was balanced by an increase in the importance of dyeing and finishing (Wilson 1960:214-215).

Two fundamental changes associated with dyestuffs and dyeing appear to account for the polychrome features of the new draperies. The first was transoceanic shipping that

brought tropical dyestuffs to northern ports via the Atlantic coast, bypassing the Levantine bottleneck and undermining Italian monopolies in the luxury trade. The consequences were immediate. In the sixteenth century, Javanese indigo, unloaded in Antwerp from Por-

tuguese ships, caused woad producers all over Europe to organize. Forming syndicates in restraint of trade, they labeled indigo the devil's dye, a deceitful, devouring, and corrosive substance that they said would ruin fabric. Newly available brazilwood was similarly stigmatized as having been "invented by aliens to the great hurt and slander of woolen cloths" (Leggett 1944:22; Linthicum 1963:5). Perhaps because such resistance ran counter to economic realities, however, it was short-lived. More characteristic of the period was the welcome given to cochineal, a New World source of scarlet superior to and cheaper than kermes and over which the Spanish emperor (the black-clad Philip II) sought monopoly control. Pirates from Holland and England, with the backing of their respective governments, seized cochineal and other New World dyes from Spanish ships (Andrews 1964). Significant- ly, "colonial textile dyes were amongst the first articles of trade to be 'enumerated' under the Navigation Act of the [English] Restoration" (Wilson 1960:218).

As exotic and reputable dyestuffs became available through new and non-Italian chan-

nels, including a route manned by the Fuggers from Lisbon to south Germany, various Euro-

pean governments stepped up the age-old effort to attract skilled dyers. The dyers' accelerated geographical mobility constituted the second fundamental change of relevance

to the dyeing and finishing of new draperies. Colbert's arguments to Louis XIV in seven-

teenth-century France offer a good illustration of why dyers were much in demand:

If the manufacture of silk, wool, and thread is that which serves to sustain and make commerce pay, dyeing, which gives them a beautiful variety of colors such as are found in nature, is the soul without which the body would have but little life (quoted in Beer 1960:21).

Colbert added that colors should "last as long as the fabrics to which they are applied" (quoted in Beer 1960:21), a dictum that was implemented by separating dyers into two

guilds, one for fast colors, and one less prestigious for fugitive colors. The state permitted only the former to dye cloth for export, and it was this category that needed an infusion of

foreign skills (Cole 1964:145-159; 205).




Colbert's France lured dyers with the promise of tax exemptions and freedom from re-

ligious persecution, thus attracting the many Protestant craftsmen in the textile industry. It has been suggested, in fact, that the earliest centers of new drapery manufacture were also

places where the Calvinist wing of the Reformation spread rapidly and came under heavy attack during the Counter-Reformation. Coleman, among others, questions "how far and how rapidly the manufacture of the lighter fabrics would have become established had

religious bigotry and military violence not led to the celebrated diaspora of Protestants"

(Coleman 1969:426). Counter-Reformation violence in south Germany and the Low Coun- tries turned many thousands of Protestants into refugees. A large number of these refugees were skilled workmen, the most highly skilled being dyers (Burn 1846: Kisch 1964; see also Kamen 1971:89-99; Trevor-Roper 1967). It was incumbent upon states like England and

Holland, where the new draperies were not yet well-established, to offer protection and ex-

emptions to Protestant migrants. Flemish, German, and Portuguese (Jewish) dyers took their skills to both countries in the 1560s and 1570s.

The order in which they took them is interesting, for continental dyers did not approach England first, despite its abundance of wool. Perhaps because of Dutch superiority in commerce and shipping, hence better access to exotic dyestuffs, these skilled craftsmen were

initially drawn toward Holland. There followed a period during which the majority of

English textiles were shipped, undyed, to Leiden, where they were dyed or redyed violet, purple, and green. Then, according to English critics, they were stretched, mislabeled, and sold (Friis 1927:237). The efforts of the English to reverse this situation reinforce the conclusion that dyeing was one of textile manufacture's most critical components, certainly when it came to production for foreign markets.13

In late Elizabethan England, landowners and merchants launched projects to cultivate more woad, saffron, and madder at home, to open up alum mines, and to supplant olive oil, imported from Spain for use in dyeing, with home-grown rape seed oil (Coleman 1969:46; Moir 1957). Then, a famous experiment provoked a trade war with Holland. Alderman

Cockayne, a merchant trader (with interests in the Levant), convinced the government of James I in the early seventeenth century to block the export of undyed cloth from the realm. When Holland threatened to retaliate by increasing its own production of woolen cloth, England went further and blocked the export of raw wool (Friis 1927:237; Wilson 1965:69-70).

The Cockayne Project failed. Nevertheless, perhaps because England possessed "a quasi- monopoly of long-staple wool," dyers eventually gravitated there (Bowden 1962:53). Bauer, a Fleming, was said by Roger Coke to have brought "fifty Walloons with him who in- structed the English how to 'make and dye fine woolen cloths cheaper by forty percent than they could before'" (quoted in Wilson 1960:215, n.2). In the early seventeenth cen-

tury, a Flemish chemist, Cornelius Drebbel and his sons-in-law, the Kufflers, experimented in England with a pewter mordant for cochineal, arriving at a marketable product known as the bow-dye process that considerably reduced the cost of making reds (Rapp 1975:517; Singer 1956, Vol. III: 692-695). Advances were also made in dyeing with anil, Javanese in-

digo. Reflecting and encouraging these efforts, the newly founded Royal Society declared a strong interest in technological innovations in dyeing and heard three papers on the sub-

ject in the 1660s (Wilson 1960:215). The manufacture of new draperies in England picked up modestly after the first migra-

tions of 1560. New draperies were as important an export as old ones on the eve of the Civil War in 1620, and by the mid-seventeenth century, they had taken over, underwriting a com- plementary shift of English trade. The fact that these cloths were now dyed and finished in England also gave a boost to English merchants. No longer primarily oriented toward north

European markets, these adventurers were off to distant places like India and Turkey (every gentleman wanted one of his sons to be a merchant in Turkey, which, after all, was




the old Byzantine "Mecca"). They even carried flashy striped sashes to the Tartars. Soon English merchants were picking up Indian cottons for the return voyage, and these, being lighter and more colorful still than the new draperies, were imitated at home. As is well known, imitation Indian cloth, containing ever more (imported) cotton in proportion to wool or linen, was eventually produced in factories, on machines (Fisher 1950; Wilson 1960:210-212,1965:69-79). English cloth no longer merely covered elephants in India; it was becoming a strategic manufacture that, along with guns, would help dissolve the subconti- nent's flourishing textile industries and convert India into an exporter of raw cotton.

English, French, and Dutch textiles also penetrated the Mediterranean in the seventeenth

through nineteenth centuries: Spain, Portugal, North Africa, the Levant, and Italy itself. For

many Italian towns and cities, the challenge to industry was abrupt and catastrophic. The woolen cloth output of Venice, for example, declined by one-fourth or one-third between 1600 and 1630, and 28,000 cloths per year in the mid-fifteenth century were reduced to but seven hundred by the eighteenth (Vaussard 1963:77; see also Cipolla 1975:9). Indeed, by the eighteenth century, Italy had ceased to be a center of cloth manufacture; its principal exports became agricultural products and raw or reeled silk to supply the industries of France. Surprisingly, this reversal in the Renaissance flow of textiles had less to do with the

light weight of the new draperies than with their low cost. In a fascinating account, Richard

Rapp demonstrates that North Atlantic Europe undermined Italian leadership in industry by flooding Italy and Italy's foreign markets with cheaper imitations of its own, polychrome wares (Rapp 1975; see also Bowden 1962:54; Wilson 1960). Venetian senators, faced with the threat that northern textiles posed to markets at home and abroad, referred to them

contemptuously as gaudy and outlandish (Cipolla 1952). The Italians defended themselves with sumptuary laws, which they enacted with ever-

greater frequency after 1600. Just as transalpine regulations of the Renaissance period had interdicted Italianate luxuries, these laws forbade Paris and London fashions as well as

lace, wigs, ribbons, embroidery, trim, and gold jewelry (Molmenti 1880:276, 359-360; Schnapper 1971; Vaussard 1963). Meanwhile England, enjoying an ever more favorable ex-

change rate based on textile exports "had no formal clothing ordinances on the law books

[after] 1604," except the requirement that citizens should be buried in English-made woolen shrouds (Freudenberger 1973:137).

The sumptuary legislation of modern Italy sought above all to control the behavior of

nobles, who had begun to spend lavishly just as their potential to accumulate capital from financial and commercial enterprise collapsed. As Molmenti put it, one can be defeated in commerce as in love and then "riches cease, ruin ensues and luxuries come in to cover and hide the ruin" (1880:282). Comparing the preambles of Venetian dress codes before and after the "decline of Italy," James C. Davis found legislators losing interest in whether high living offended God, but increasingly worried that if nobles dissipated their private for-

tunes, they would lose their political position as a ruling class (1962:45). Within the nobility, the target group was women who, according to Molmenti, devoted at least seven hours each day to their wardrobes and the mirror (1880:358). This sexual bias may have reflected a change in the dynamics of fashion, which some authorities suggest began to show greater exaggerations and higher rates of change in women's than in men's attire after around 1630-that is, after the fashion capitals moved from south to north (see Freudenberger 1973:138-139). A simpler explanation is that the sumptuary laws of modern Italy, like their

equivalents all over the world, at least since Roman times, were made by governments of men.

As dress regulations proliferated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became the rule that noblemen, and especially noblewomen, should dress in black, certainly after

they had been married for a few years. It is, of course, an open question just how many ac-

tually obeyed the rules. Vaussard claims that in 1797, there were 852 wigmakers in Venice,




despite the fact that wigs were illegal. The majority of these craftsmen were foreign and many made wigs of blond Belgian hair (1963:43). Similarly, Schnapper cites a brief interval in the eighteenth century, "unanimously considered licentious and scandalous, when some nobles adopted a costume of color" (1971:34). There were also regional differences. Sicily, for example, maintained unencumbered commercial links with France and England until the mid-nineteenth century, with the result that members of the island's aristocracy competed in the display of variously colored French and English goods (Pitre 1939:305-320; Vaussard 1963:44-45). The rest of Italy, however, was by the nineteenth century deeply involved in a developmental effort to adopt the competitive techniques of Holland and England and to recover lost textile industries and lost commercial strength. This effort must have gained considerably in both a symbolic and a practical sense from the overall seriousness with which most Italian nobles took the need for austerity. Their somber dress contrasted with that of counterparts north of the Alps where, during the period of the Reformation, restraint had been a middle-class, and often a popular, but rarely an upper- class phenomenon.

Perhaps this difference in the way Italians, once the preeminent peacocks, took up the penguin's shield also corresponded to the altered structure of the hegemony of manufactures in modern Europe. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Italian and Italianized merchants had tempted populations north of the Alps with finery that local craftsmen could not easily duplicate. English, French, and Dutch fashions, smuggled as well as imported into Italy, were sought less for their beauty and quality-attributes that sometimes went by the wayside-than because they were affordable, whereas Italian manufactures were not. One imagines that upper-class families found it easier to give up colors as advances in textile dyeing characteristic of the modern era made polychrome cloth ever more widely available. Much as the aristocracy in modern England retreated from conspicuous consumption behind layers of earthy tweed, black eased out colors in the upper classes of Italian towns and cities and left the brilliance of the Renaissance to the masses, whose interest in color was patronized with cheaper and cheaper goods.

We know about the chastened nobility of modern Italy from Vaussard's study of daily life in the eighteenth century and from a recent book by Dominique Schnapper, whose descriptions of Bologna and other cities are based in part on the research of a sociological- ly minded historian of costume, Rosita Levi Pisetsky. In addition to the content of sumptuary laws, these scholars have found a rich source of data in the diaries and correspondence of travelers who, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, visited Italy from the north. Rarely did they fail to remark that "all the nobles are uniformly dressed in black." In Genoa, to take one example, the wives of nobles were said by travelers to be "forced" to wear black velvet in winter, black taffeta in summer, except in their first year of marriage (Vaussard 1963:44). Schnapper, who has constructed a chart to emphasize how frequently foreign visitors commented on the "refusal of color" in Italy, quotes the sur- prised observation of one that "'the Opera in the evening resembles above all a funeral ceremony'" (quoted in Schnapper 1971:30-32).

According to Schnapper, black in Italy was not only a color of mourning, it was "the col- or of high society, in contrast to the popular classes." Although symbolic of restraint, it was superbly elegant; indeed, it was regularly worn, where gold and silver were forbidden, with diamonds-" 'the remaining proof of grandeur [when] every other sign of wealth has disap- peared' " (quoted in Schnapper 1971:29, also 35). Sumptuary laws also indicate that in the mourning context black could be quite extravagant. Regulations fixed the maximum length of the mourning period according to the degree of relationship to the deceased and limited the participation of children and servants in rituals. In addition, they specified how many ornaments of crepe, fur, leather, and lace could be added to the basic costume and of what fabrics that costume might be made. The duration of processions, the number of wax




candles, the display of corpses in houses and silk shrouds in church all became objects of

control, again pointing to a connection between black dress and high social standing. We are reminded of the indulgent black court of Philip II in Spain, although Schnapper finds reasonable the argument that Venice, the city with Protestant inclinations, rather than Catholic Madrid, provided penguin models for the rest of Italy (Schnapper 1971:34). Venice, after all, had legislated that its gondolas be black like funeral carriages but had permitted elaborations of brass and gold leaf to modify the simplicity of the symbol (Molmenti 1880:371 and n.2).

Whatever the origin of these models, they never inundated the entire cultural landscape, but instead left highly visible patches of color everywhere. Vaussard's description of the

eighteenth century strikes a theme that contemporary ethnographers continue to observe: the alternation in ritual life between indulgence and abstinence, scandal and confession, carnival and lent (for example, Silverman 1975:157-165). In chromatic language, there are

abrupt transitions from variegated brilliance to more or less austere black themes. Much of the brilliance harks back to the fifteenth century but has become grotesque, as when the

particolored dress of the courtesan became the uniform of livery (Davenport 1948:190). Carnival is in many ways a popular parody of the Renaissance court, made more colorful still by "oriental" bursts of confetti. And polychrome hangings, flowers, plumes, pompoms, mirrors, festoons, streamers, and fireworks are regular features of the religious procession that, as in the contrast of Carnival with Lent, distinguishes saint's day festivities from the celebration of mass (Vaussard 1963: 76-78; 140-151).

In general, intervals of exploding color in the otherwise somber landscape that came to characterize Italy as its former splendor faded increased as one descended the social scale. Whereas the Catholic Church fostered black and white as the appropriate colors for wed-

dings, the Sicilian peasant bride wore a brightly colored, floral print silk dress. She wore a well-tailored black one on the Sunday following her wedding when she first attended mass with her husband, however (Chapman 1971:105). Elsewhere, particularly in the south, bright colors persisted in peasant dress until the twentieth century. Of special note is Tarantism, an ecstatic religious cult dating back to the fifteenth century, which attracted low status women in southern Italy. Characterized as Dionysian, this cult reversed the folk view of colors illustrated by the tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In a trance state, presumably induced by the bite of a (black) tarantula spider, possessed cultists wildly em- braced reds, blues, greens, and yellows and manifested a "'great revulsion toward black, assailing those who wore robes of that color'" (quoted in Schnapper 1971:34; see also Lewis 1971:41-43, 89-92). Their dismay at the sight of black suggests the extent to which it had become the color of "the establishment" in modern Italy.

In discussing Spanish black, I proposed that despite elaboration and even despite its

place in the banners of the Counter-Reformation, it could be considered a descendant of the revolutionary tradition of Saint Benedict. The same can be said for black dress in Italy, where its close association with the nobility did not preclude identification with the Church. A color of religion and ceremony that committed its wearers to restrain their desire for luxuries, it served as a "patriotic" color, particulary appropriate in circumstances where the most consumable "things" were manufactured abroad. Revolution had given way to

patriotism, egalitarianism to an imposed social order, and the symbol black dress now

distinguished the nobility as well as ascetic "heretics" and monks living without property or

possessions. Yet a portion of the symbol's content, and some of its meaning, were the same-which tells us something important about key symbols.

An appreciation of the continuity of these symbols, their resilience and flexibility, their

tendency to expand and embrace contradictions, or, as Ortner (1973:1342) has suggested, to synthesize complex experience, is essential if we are not to misread their significance. Since the eighteenth century, and under the influence of an increasingly bureaucratized




Church, the use of black dress has spread in Italy from cities to the countryside, from the

opera house to the parish, and into the peasant class. Here, its association with mourning is

obviously close, but does this mean that the message being communicated is exclusively a

message about death? Proceeding from a logical connection between the color black and

death, one might conclude that the wearer of black is a source of pollution who must

undergo a period of social isolation. A historical understanding of the color points to a different interpretation. The person in black, living in a state of ascetic self-denial and close to the antimaterialist condition of death, manifests the most laudatory religious attitude and, unless the mourning is carried to extremes, is worthy of respect. For such a person is the pious citizen of a civilization whose development at various conjunctures was advanced by restraint.

conclusion

This paper has used historical reconstruction to promote understanding of a key symbol, the widespread use of black dress in Europe. Adoption of the symbol was traced to the Mid- dle Ages, when it first became a feature of the European landscape, distinguishing it from civilizations of the Near and Far East. These civilizations were not only older and better established than the petty kingdoms of Europe, but they also regularly exported polychrome textiles for which Europeans traded such critical resources as bullion and slaves. The highly uneven world distribution of quality dyestuffs and skilled dyers that characterized the medieval period furthered Byzantine and Islamic monopolies in the production of colored cloth. These monopolies, and the unbalanced exchanges that they underwrote, suggest that the ascetic goals of medieval Christianity were more than a moral exhortation. In addition to enjoining people to commune with God through the rejection of worldly goods, they furthered an economic boycott of luxury imports, a boycott necessary to the eventual autonomous development of Europe. Black dress, one of the chief means of communicating asceticism, also had a practical dimension: unlike polychrome clothing, it could be elaborated and perfected by indigenous craftsmen using indigenous raw materials. As such, it participated directly in the revolutionary transformation of European society that took place in the Middle Ages and began to redress the relationship of Europe to the outside world.

What about subsequent manifestations of black? In the Middle Ages, the symbol expressed egalitarian norms. The color of plain wool robes, it was an emblem of monastic dedication to apostolic poverty, of a concept of death in which all are stripped of worldly rank and possessions, of the decline of slavery and its replacement by serfdom. With time, however, internally generated economic development brought about elaborations of the symbol that were consonant with new forms of social stratification. Black dress then became the preferred costume of highly privileged noblemen and rulers, and segments of the bourgeoisie also dressed in black.

Concrete instances of symbolic elaboration, such as those displayed by the merchants of Venice, the Dukes of Burgundy, the Calvinists of Geneva, and so on, at first suggest a bewildering array of variables. Some of these instances fall into place when we think about the political significance of symbols. Thus, it might be hypothesized that all revolutionary transformations establish autonomy and growing space for the populations in which they occur at the same time that they overturn past relations of production. In doing so they call forth innovations in every domain of existence: literature, art, music, dress, medicine, and foreign policy, as well as the mode of production. With time these innovations become part of the traditional heritage, to be drawn upon by a multiplicity of groups for contradictory




ends. Above all, in subsequent periods of "revolutionary crisis," of which the Reformation

might be exemplary, political actors "anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past . . . and borrow from them names, battle cries, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the apostle Paul" (Marx 1959:320).

In addition to the political implications of black dress symbolism, the analysis of several cases presented in this paper reveals a common economic thread. Each case showed the continued significance of the economic boycott, such that wearing black still communicated the need for, and probably still promoted, measures intended to protect home industries from foreign competition. In other words, despite a considerable evolution of social form, and despite the fact that the powerful as well as the powerless, the flamboyant as well as the plain wore black clothing, some of the same material conditions that furthered black dress before, say, 1200, influenced its adoption later on. An examination of class relations in what Shanin has called the "global perspective of uneven, linked and con-

tradictory development" (1977:295-296) can explain why this was so. Characteristic of recent political economy (for example, Wallerstein 1974), this perspective draws attention to

relationships of unequal power among as well as within geographically separated populations and, in the process, illuminates aspects of culture that an analysis of class relations alone leaves obscure. Such a perspective implies that when economic and political elites succeed in manipulating symbols that were once the ideological product of an egalitarian movement, something more complicated than "mystification" is taking place.

I do not wish to suggest that all symbols originate in contexts of revolutionary transformation. On the contrary, the great weight of symbolic communication probably has

nothing to do with this magnitude of struggle and change. I suspect, however, that many key symbols associated with cloth and clothing are related to substantial shifts in social formation and in the orientation of a people toward external centers of power. Before the twentieth century, textile manufacturing was often the driving wedge of economic

development, absorbing the greatest share of nonagricultural labor and producing the most

strategic exports-exports that were capable of attracting basic resources from others.

Europeans were hardly the only ones to shun polychrome textiles. The early Egyptian monks went naked and barefoot or wore coarse, uncomfortable garments that, if found by the roadside, "no one would think of taking" (Butler 1961:41). More recently, humble, brown attire made from cloth found in graveyards clothed the extremely ascetic Buddhist monks whom Yalman studied in Ceylon (1962). The most world renouncing of all Jains, the naked Digambaras, reject the blankets of other Jain monks and carry brooms of peacock feathers-a striking denigration of colors (Dasgupta 1969: 71, n.1).14 It seems likely that the

dynamics of political economy outlined in this paper could contribute to the comparative study of these and other movements through which non-Europeans have boycotted luxury cloth.15

notes

'The inclusion of bullion with food and slaves in a category of basic resources is problematic, yet important to the overall argument of this essay. In a review of Wallerstein (1974), I attempted to spell out a relationship based on the virtually instant convertibility, regardless of time and place, of gold and silver into various resources, including many that are essential to military viability (see Schneider 1977a; also 1977b).

2Many people have generously contributed to this essay. I am indebted to Sylvia Thrupp, the medievalist, who criticized an early draft, raised a number of crucial issues, and offered helpful sug- gestions. Several colleagues made substantive, bibliographical, and editorial comments on a subsequent version. Having incorporated many of these comments and having also benefitted from their en- couragement, I would like to thank the following people: Shirley Lindenbaum, Joyce Riegelhaupt,




Mical Schneider, Peter Schneider, Sydel Silverman, and Eric Wolf. Finally, Richard Rapp, an economic historian, Richard Fox, and Katherine Verdery wrote thoughtful analyses of the argument that helped me to clarify my thinking and saved me from some mistakes.

3Scarlets are also mentioned. However, this word originally referred to a type of fine elastic woolen cloth, rather than to a color (Davenport 1948:151). According to Heers, reds of all kinds were unusual in the Middle Ages (Heers 1971).

41 do not wish to minimize the significance of African relations with Europe. Italian goods crossed the Sahara to be exchanged for African gold in the late Middle Ages, recalling the trans-Saharan trade of Roman times. It is also of note that African societies of the medieval period supported both weavers and dyers (especially of indigo). African cloth did not penetrate Europe, however, and lies beyond the scope of this paper.

5There is a myth that saffron came to England during the reign of Edward III in a pilgrim's staff-a myth similar to the one that accounts for the arrival of silkworms in Constantinople in the sixth century (Linthicum 1962:2).

6Monasteries also issued razors and monks were clean-shaven-an interesting example of the variety that ascetic rigors can take. Later, Protestants railed against the vanity of shaving and insisted upon beards. In one context, beards evoked a sexual meaning and were repressed. In the other, razors and smooth skin were signs of a soft effeminacy and met the same fate (Hunt 1967:79).

7The indigenous origin of black dyes and of the process by which black dyeing was perfected con- stitute adequate evidence for the argument that black dress symbolized commitment to the development of an autonomous civilizational center in Europe. This thesis, in other words, does not depend on medieval sheep changing color. While I think it is plausible that they did, and have cited pertinent sources, it should be noted that Sylvia Thrupp was doubtful that Benedictine black was natural black or that sheep were later bred for white fleece. Ongoing historical and archaeological studies of the medieval cloth industry may further illuminate this aspect of the history of costume.

8Given the association that I am attempting to make between black dress and austerity as well as death, it would be helpful to know the historical details of mourning practices and how they changed during the Middle Ages. Regional studies of court and ecclesiastical regulations might provide an outline, and would be worth examining if they exist. Other approaches to symbolism would discourage such a time-consuming exploration, however. Leach, for example, once wrote:

Europeans wear black for mourning, Chinese wear white. In each case the special status of the mourner is indicated by the wearing of special dress. But the question of why one culture selects black for this purpose and another white is surely both irrelevant and unanswerable (Leach 1958:152). 9Variation in form and texture was also important, and some courtiers called attention to

themselves by having bells sewn on their garments or by wearing "oderiferous scarlets"-perfumed cloth (Brooke 1967:106-111; Norris 1938, Book 11:65). Color, however, was the crucial medium for the expression of individuality (Heers 1971:1096-1097).

'?This is not to say that Italian merchants were uninvolved in slaving; on the contrary, they organized an active slave trade that brought human chattel from southern Russia and later from Africa into the cities and towns of Italy and Spain (Origo 1955; Verlinden 1955, Vol.1:319-370, 1969).

11t also diverged from the Valois court in Paris. I am aware that in condensing the historical geography of European textiles into a few pages, I have oversimplified and left out important events. One of these is the rise of the Paris region as a significant center of manufacturing, distribution, and fashion, so that by the end of the sixteenth century, the Venetian ambassador could remark, " 'a man ... is not respected [here] if he does not have twenty-five to thirty suits of different types which he changes every day' " (quoted in Braudel 1973:231). Whereas the Burgundian court governed Flanders, the court in Paris was hegemonic over Mediterranean France-a difference that may account for the absence of a black wool phase in its development.

"2Once it is accepted that the relationship of culture to political economy is fruitfully explored within a framework of intersocietal as well as intrasocietal processes, the perpetual question of the priority or nonpriority of culture, as exemplified by the debate surrounding Max Weber's thesis on the Protestant Ethic and capitalism, begins to fall into place. No longer is it necessary to choose between two opposed positions: one that capitalism arose out of Calvinism, and the other that Protestant ideology expressed the class position of a capitalist bourgeoisie. Rather, we are led to examine various facets of Protestant doctrine and such Protestantlike phenomena as sumptuary laws in terms of the balance of trade between luxury-exporting and energy-exporting world areas. With the balance of trade as a focus, it no longer matters whether most capitalist investors were Calvinists-only that there was a convergence of interests between specialists in morality and specialists in finance at certain critical junctures in European history. The point is important because of the many Catholic financiers and hypocritical Calvinists who deployed their money in contradictory ways during the Reformation period (see Kamen 1971:88-99; Trevor-Roper 1967).

'3The same consideration still operated in the early twentieth century, as evidenced by the amount of capital invested in chemical research to improve the quality and fastness of synthetic dyes, and by the well-organized effort in England and the United States at the onset of World War I to find




substitutes for some of the chemical components of aniline dyes that were previously imported from Germany. Perhaps because Germany had missed out on the acquisition of tropical colonies, its chemical industries and research establishment were at that point more advanced than anywhere else in Europe and employed several hundred more chemists (Howe and Barrowcliff 1945).

141 am grateful to Shirley Lindenbaum for this obscure reference. 5The analysis ought to work for such recent revolutionary situations as that of Cambodia where, ac-

cording to a New York Times report (Kamm 1975), the people were told, in the interests of self- sufficiency, to grow cotton and mulberry trees. "Individuals can wear clothes they still own, but if they look too foreign, the wearers should find a dark dye." Similarly, according to A. C. Scott, the uniform of the Chinese revolutionary army was not red, but cotton of a harsh yellow-green obtained from the "dyeing facilities peculiar to the Yenan district where [the army] had [its] headquarters for so long." Scott's description of the dark blue clothes adopted by civilians after the revolution recalls every important dimension of Saint Benedict's Rule. The tunic and trousers of the peasant, well-suited for hard manual labor, became the dress of all. A mark of revolutionary pride, leaders were careful to appear on ceremonial occasions in especially well-groomed versions of the uniform. Economic and utilitarian, the dark blue pajama further satisfied the urgent necessity of revolutionary China to "make itself independent of others." Drabness both expressed and advanced the insulation of Chinese markets against western textiles, which, since the Opium Wars of the 1840s, had been penetrating local communities, causing an exodus of silver and destroying the capacity to weave (Scott 1965:127-130).

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Date of Submission: February 9, 1978 Date of Acceptance: April 25, 1978




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