Shoes, Gowns and Turncoats: Reconsidering Cacciaguida’s History of Florentine Fashion and Politics

If Lucan attends heavily to Marcia’s chaste attire, then Benvenuto’s commentary likewise focuses entirely on women as the agents of fashion. [...]he reads “donne contigiate” as a reference to women’s footwear, unlike the unspecific definition of decoration that can be found in the Ottimo Commento. According to Piponnier and Mane, when gendered differences in dress developed in the fourteenth century, “there would have been no question of a woman adopting the two-piece male outfit that revealed the legs so generously.” According to Catherine Kovesi Killerby, in 1273 the citizens of Messina “sent a petition to the king [Charles I of Anjou] asking him to revoke the law because the women in their households had refused to renounce their customary clothing.” Giorgio Inglese, taking this sumptuary history into account, states that the most logical reading of v.101 would be “calze contigiate”; see Inglese, “Cacciaguida: canti XV-XVI-XVII,” in Esperimenti danteschi (Genoa-Milan: Marietti, 2010), 176–7. Because the daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with outstretched necks, glancing wantonly with their eyes mincing along as they go, tinkling with their feet, therefore the Lord will strike with a scab the heads of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts.