| Abstrakt: |
In her 1385 testament, a noble Neapolitan widow instructed that she was to be clothed in a new Dominican habit on her deathbed, and that subsequently this habit should be given to the friar who had served as her confessor and executor. In turn, he would provide his old habit to clothe her for burial. It was not exceptional for a pious fourteenth-century layperson to seek to die and be buried wearing the habit of a religious order, but this kind of postmortem clothing exchange was highly unusual. After briefly surveying medieval customs of death and burial in religious habits, this article analyzes the habit swap in the context of several other medieval cultural trends, including charitable gifts of clothing, close relationships between holy women and their (often mendicant) confessors, the use of clothing and textiles as contact relics, female-to-male crossdressing in religious contexts, and the use of items of dress as tokens of earthly and/or spiritual love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
