Here's the appropriate bits from Hodges, Laura F. "Chaucer and Costume:
The Secular Pilgrims in the General Prologue." (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer,
2000) pp. 163 - 172.
Echoes what has already been said here, but I thought it was
interesting nonetheless! BTW, here's the usual picture:
http://www.unc.edu/depts/chaucer/zatta/wife.jpg
Excerpts, without footnotes:
"Alisoun's Sunday garb includes three items of expensive dress
commonplace in estates satires: a headdress notable enough to swear by,
fine red hosiery, and new shoes. Those members of parliament who
wished, through sumptuary laws, to regulate dress according to income
and birth would probably agree that the Wife's cumulative inheritances
and her cloth-making success entitled her to dress in this
manner...However, the satirists and moralists would not have been so
generous...
"The moralists were most concerned with what they deemed excess in
dress as it demonstrated the sin of pride..."
Hodges then goes on to give examples of how Chaucer and others often
used an ornate headdress to signify pride, vanity, temptation/unchaste
behavior, and/or an attempt to challenge their husbands as heads of
households, but continues...
"However, the study of the history of costume and textiles throws
additional light on the coverchiefs suggested in Chaucer's description.
In the past, critics have debated the nature of these coverchiefs and
the issue of how fashionable they may have been. To clarify these
separate issues, several things must be considered. 'Hir coverchiefs
ful fyne weren of ground' (I, line 453) which Riverside glosses 'fine
in texture', indicates quality. However, the first MED definition for
ground in this context is 'the background for ornamentation of fabric',
and both the MED and OED cite Chaucer's usage in this line as the first
literary example. Further, this definition facilitates a better
understanding of Chaucer's attribution of heavy weight to this
headdress. Granted that a fine fabric was used, what kind of decorated
coverchiefs might make a weight of ten pounds? Stella Mary Newton and
Mary M. Giza provide an answer to this question. They describe a veil
headdress that began to appear in illuminations and sculpture by the
1360s, one which they characterize as 'veils edged with a forest of
frills in airy layers almost impossible to count' and very difficult
for sculptors to portray except in a stylized manner... [list some
examples and provides drawing of the headdress that should be familiar
to most h-costumers!]...The multiple frills at the veil's edge are
achieved through a weaving process, by adding considerably to the
threads at the selvedge edge, thus producing the fluted or goffered
appearance, and additional weight."
"The air flow from the forward movement of dame Alisoun, striding
toward the alter rail, would have lifted and fluffed the frills of such
coverchiefs and added to the appearance of fullness and
weight...Nevertheless even the most beruffled coverchiefs would be
unlikely to weight ten ounds...and we should read the narrator's
oath...as comic hyperbole directed at a fanciful headdress."
"As funeral brasses from the 1360s onward make clear, elegant
coverchiefs so beruffled that they give the impression of heacy weight
were in style in the late 1380s. They were neither a new style nor a
fading style at that time, and Chaucer's description suggests that the
Wife wears such a headdress, one that demonstrates her knowledge of
fine quality in fabric and familiarity with special weaving techniques.
In her portrait her coverchiefs serve as her hallmark; they adorn at
the same time that they advertise, both for business and pleasure,
especially so since, for dame Alisoun, the two are so frequently
indistinguishable."
Hodges goes on to suggest that an additional association between
coverchief and the word coverture. "Legally, coverture is 'the
condition or position of a woman during her married life, when she is
by law under the authority and protection of her husbane' (OED), a
definition that the Wife's description of her five marriages makes
highly ironic and that invests any coverchiefs, symbol of marital
subjection, with the same irony."
"The Wife's coverchiefs, then, are a highly charged costume sign: they
are literally a gesture of submission to her married and legal status,
as depited in Chaucer's designation 'good WF' (line 445) and to St.
Paul's dictum that womne's heads should be covered in church;
economically the proclamation of a cloth-maker's community status and
wealth; aesthetically the beautiful veiling of an attractive, seductive
woman, and morally the announcement of a woman's pride, materialism,
and by extension her unchastity, her sexual manipulation confessed so
blatently in her Prologue."
- Hope
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