Abstract
The civil war between the 'Armagnacs' and the 'Burgundians' in Paris saw the proliferation and use of a great number of new party insignia. These signs served as uniforms, distinguishing one party from the other, but they were also charged with far more potent meanings and connotations, repro ducing the elementary cognitive and perceptive structures of that society. This essay tries to investigate the basic meanings of such 'signs', which expressed the ideas of legitimate authority and justice exercised in the name of the king—a mental complex that was clearly gendered and attributed to masculinity. The gendered connotations of those party signs can be illustrated through a reading of the miniatures of the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, but they also surfaced indirectly when women wore those signs dur ing the troubles of the civil war. The fact that such women provoked reac tions of bewilderment and hostility from the chroniclers, who accused them of debasing the social order and of becoming prostitutes by wearing those signs, points to the aggressive semiotic potential of party signs and to the interpretive operations of inversion they effected. Such mechanisms of inver sion were furthered by the binary structure of the semiotic system distin guishing 'enemies' from 'friends'. The procedure of inversion as it operates through insignia during the Parisian Civil War worked towards the consti tution of gender difference and can furnish valuable insights into the func tioning of masculinity and feminity as its constructed opposite.
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