IN THIRTEENTH-CENTURY SPAIN, no one other than the king was legally permitted to wear a scarlet rain cape; in 1356, the city of Florence proclaimed it illegal for women to have buttons on their clothing without corresponding buttonholes; while in England in 1363, Parliament decreed that only knights and clerics with incomes above a certain amount were permitted to wear linen in the summer. As puzzling as these restrictions may seem to the modern mind, they were profoundly meaningful to contemporaries, since sumptuary laws such as these were enacted in great numbers throughout Western Europe from the mid-thir-teenth century on; there are more than three hundred examples from the Italian city-states alone.

Although scholarly interest in sumptuary law has increased in recent decades, the laws hold far more potential as a historical resource than has yet been realized. To date, moreover, the various bodies of sumptuary law have been studied in geographic and temporal isolation from one another, rather than as a whole, as a large corpus with local variations. It is time to approach sumptuary law on a comparative basis, to allow internal similarities and differences to suggest new meanings and new avenues of research.

What Is Sumptuary Law?

Sumptuary law is often defined rather vaguely, as laws intended to regulate any kind of consumption of any kind of commodity. Some recent legal scholarship even classifies intellectual property law as sumptuary law, for instance, or describes the 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act in the United States as a form of sumptuary law. Even the word “sumptuary,” which strictly speaking should be applied only to sumptuary laws, is now often used to describe goods of widely differing types. In actuality, sumptuary law was always narrowly focused on personal consumption and almost always aimed at its public display. It might be directed at the construction of lavish houses, as in medieval Japan or precolonial Burma, or, as in many cultures, it might regulate public or semi-public events such as banquets, weddings, and funerals. Laws governing dress appear to be universal to all sumptuary laws.