Fashion in Spanish Literature in the Last Decade of the Fifteenth Century

Abstract

At the end of the late Middle Ages and in the early Renaissance, there was a crisis of values in Spanish society that marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. However, there are elements of our culture, mainly related to Catholicism, that survive, such as social stratification, sexism, and the control of human behavior by the Church. To analyze these issues, clothing embodied in the artistic expressions of our literature serves as both testimony and a literary device influencing character development. Thus, this paper focuses on the selection of works in the literature of the last decade of the fifteenth century in our search for and choice of a precise and concrete corpus that will help us investigate how such social gaps were enacted in the practices of this period, how the discrimination between men and women was manifested, and whether certain types of clothing were prohibited or recommended to enable better control of the Church over people, thus shaping fashions and customs.