The fabric of society: Textile and metatextual imitation in the Burgundian Cligès (1454)

This article discusses the mise en prose of Chrétien de Troyes's Cligès for the mid-fifteenth-century court of Burgundy under Philip the Good. In particular it offers a close examination of a single textual moment in the 1454 Livre de Alixandre Empereur de Constantinoble et de Cligés son Fils, the so-called embroidered shirt episode, and looks at how apparently minor changes made by the Burgundian author to Chrétien's text allow the scene to take on an importance that extends beyond the fifteenth-century reworking, and to address broader socio-cultural issues of self-fashioning at Philip's court. © Modern Humanities Research Association 2008.