‘La credenza e il pegno.’ The Fiction of Clothing between Paris and Florence (13th and 14th centuries) The Fiction of Clothing Between Paris and Florence (13th and 14th Centuries)
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Abstract
In the second half of the thirteenth century, Paris and Florence were two deeply interconnected cities. Clothes and literary texts moved across mercantile routes alongside objects, manuscripts, merchants, soldiers, intellectuals, and travelers. Individuals bought, resold, stole, and exchanged clothes, using them as gifts and as a means to make payments. In literary texts, clothes emerge both as a language that allows authors and readers to define the status of literary characters and as a form of compensation. In late medieval texts circulating between France and Italy, literary characters constantly refer to the habit of using clothes as collateral to guarantee their loans. My essay shows that secured loans provided literary authors and readers with an opportunity to imagine and calculate the value of things and to assess relationships between individuals. At the same time, pawned clothes in literary works encouraged authors and readers to interpret narrative threads and reflect upon the verisimilitude and the credibility of storytelling.
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