Church writers, national and local administrations, and interested observers of society regularly condemned their contemporaries’ extravagant behavior and appearance. Manners, carriage, gestures, diet, drink, clothing, makeup, and hairstyles all formed a complex aggregation thought to be specific to particular estates, classes, genders, sexualities, and occupations (see “Feasts,” p. 190). The pestilences of the later fourteenth century stimulated anxieties about social movement and personal transgressions, as evidenced in the legislation to … Read the rest