Chapter 2 2. The devil in striped clothes-1

Shame of the Carmelites All scandals leave evidence and documents.Through such evidence and documents, ancient historians often knew more about the disruption of order than about the social order itself.This has been the case with regard to stripes and striped clothing since the Middle Ages.Monochrome has little documentation because it stands for commonplace, everyday, and "standard," while stripes has a lot of documentation because it confuses and is criticized. (1) The disgrace of the Carmelite monks The scandal took place in 13th-century France, in the late summer of 1254, when Saint-Louis was returning to Paris after a tragic captivity and four-year sojourn in the Holy Land after an ill-fated crusade.The king did not come back alone, he brought back some Protestants who had come to France, and some of these Protestants were monks of the Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmelite.The scandal was caused by them: they wore striped coats.

The earliest origin of the Carmelite monks was a few monks who lived near Mount Carmel ** in Palestine in the 12th century. They tried to experience the prayer and ascetic life of the original desert monks.According to legend, Berthold, a Calabrian knight, brought them together in 1154.They were then joined by pilgrims and crusaders. In 1209, the bishop of Jerusalem instituted for them a clean and strict ascetic-based discipline.However, Pope Gregory IX relaxed the regulations on them a little later, mainly allowing them to settle in the city and concentrate on preaching.The Carmelites thus entered the ranks of the Mendicant Orders, like the Franciscans and Dominicans.Moreover, their organization imitated the latter, and like all mendicant orders, the Carmelites began to teach at the universities, in Bologna, and in Paris.[5]This is because the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem was in a difficult situation, always oppressed and threatened by Muslims, forced to leave the Holy Land forever.In fact, they were scattered throughout the West in the years before St. Louis' return (eg they were at Cambridge from 1247 onwards).What interests us, however, is that it was their arrival in Paris in 1254 that began the long debate about clothing that lasted for decades.

We now find no pictorial evidence of the clothing of Carmelite monks in the mid-thirteenth century, but textual evidence is plentiful.It is not primarily the color of the gown that is described in the text—brown, fawn, gray, black, dark in any case—but the pattern of the coat: a striped pattern, sometimes white and brown, sometimes white and black, but later are relatively rare.There have long been legends explaining the origin of the sacred striped robes associated with the Bible.It is said to imitate the robe of the Prophet Elis, the mysterious founder of the Carmelites: while riding a chariot of fire in the sky, he threw a large white cloak at the believer Elis, and the cloak preserved the flames through the flames in the form of brown stripes. burn marks left behind.The beautiful legend brings to the stage a character in the Bible that people in the Middle Ages were most fascinated by: Eli, the savior hero, is one of the rare immortal characters in the Bible.The legend also emphasizes the symbolism of the investiture through the robe: for medieval cultures, the robe was the bearer of symbols, and the act of delivering the robe was associated with the rite of passage and the entry into a new state.

Certain texts of the late 13th century developed the symbolic commentary to explicitly state that the Carmelite robe had four white stripes representing the four virtues: courage, righteousness, wisdom, and integrity, with three brown stripes between the white stripes, reminiscent of the Three virtues (faith, hope, love).In fact, there were never any regulations limiting the number, width, or direction of stripes on the robes of Carmelite monks.Various stripes can be seen in later image materials: narrow stripes, wide stripes, vertical stripes, horizontal stripes, diagonal stripes, it seems that these are neither important nor meaningful.It is important that the robe is striped, that is to say not monochromatic, unlike the robes of other people - beggars, monks or soldiers, in a word it is distinctive, in fact it is so distinctive that one cannot help became the target of public criticism.

As soon as they arrived in Paris, the Carmelite monks became the object of people's ridicule and curse. People pointed at them, cursed, laughed at and ridiculed them, and called them "slant monks", "slant" is a very derogatory word , which in Old French meant not only stripes but bastards (a satire popular in the 16th century retained this meaning). [6] Ridiculously striped clothing is not a phenomenon unique to Paris; newly settled Carmelite monks are also popular in the cities of England, Italy, Provence, Languedoc, the Rhone and Rhine valleys. laugh at.Sometimes, people not only use their mouths but also their hands, and the physical injury is accompanied by the verbal injury.People "beat up" the Carmelites just as they often "beat up" the Dominicans and the Franciscans.Dominicans and Franciscans also lived in cities, in a secular society, not in remote monasteries like monks. [7] They were condemned not only for their clothes, but also for their avarice, hypocrisy, and disloyalty.People see them as the devil and the antichrist.The Carmelites also lived on beggars, but their order was less powerful, they did not have as much influence over the crown prince, and they were not as closely connected to the instruments of religious or political oppression.The poor Carmelites were mostly condemned for wearing striped robes.

In Paris they were charged with another crime of being in close association with the non-convicted nuns, their immediate neighbors who lived on the right bank of the Seine.In a poem lashing out at the Mendicant Orders, the poet Rütboeuf accused them of having become Parisian sinners, outraged by this proximity and its possible consequences. Slanted friar next to a non-voting nun Separated by a wall, just a short distance away...［8］ But the biggest problem is the oblique robe, that is, the striped robe.In the city at the beginning of 1260, Alexander IV specifically asked the Carmelite monks to abandon their striped robes and wear monochrome robes because of such outrage in the city.Denials, polemics, threats, the conflict raged and lingered for more than a quarter of a century.The Carmelites fought 10 popes successively. In 1274 the intransigence of the Carmelites at the General Council of Lyons almost killed them.If their order was not outlawed like the other 20 "minor" mendicant orders, it was because their new master Pierre de Miro (1274-1294) promised to submit to the Pope's wishes, Fix the robe issue ASAP.In fact, after 13 years of arguments, negotiations, promises, concessions, finally in 1287, at the Superior Council in Montpellier, on the day of Marie-Madeleine, the monks decided Ditch the "diagonal" gown in favor of an all-white, sleeveless gown.But in some remote provinces, the Carmelite monks along the Rhine and in Spain and Hungary refused to obey the order and continued to wear objectionable clothing until the early 14th century.However, in 1295, Pope Boniface VIII issued a papal decree specifically for this purpose, further affirming the decision to change the robes in 1287 and reiterating that all religious believers are strictly prohibited from wearing striped clothes. [9]