It's a nice piece of pageantry. . . . Rationally it's lunatic, but in
practice, everyone enjoys it, I think.--HRH Prince Philip, Duke of
Edinburgh
Founded by Edward III in 1348, the Most Noble Order of the Garter is the
highest chivalric honor among the gifts of the Queen of England and an
institution that looks proudly back to its medieval origins. But what
does the annual Garter procession of modern princes and politicians
decked out in velvets and silks have to do with fourteenth-century
institutions? And did the Order, in any event, actually originate in the
wardrobe malfunction of the traditional story, when Edward held up his
mistress's dropped garter for all to see and declared it to be a mark of
honor rather than shame? Or is this tale of the Order's beginning
nothing more than a vulgar myth?
With steady erudition and not infrequent irreverence, Stephanie Trigg
ranges from medieval romance to Victorian caricature, from imperial
politics to medievalism in contemporary culture, to write a strikingly
original cultural history of the Order of the Garter. She explores the
Order's attempts to reform and modernize itself, even as it holds onto
an ambivalent relationship to its medieval past. She revisits those
moments in British history when the Garter has taken on new or increased
importance and explores a long tradition of amusement and embarrassment
over its formal processions and elaborate costumes. Revisiting the myth
of the dropped garter itself, she asks what it can tell us about our
desire to seek the hidden sexual history behind so venerable an
institution.
Grounded in archival detail and combining historical method with
reception and cultural studies, Shame and Honor untangles 650 years of
fact, fiction, ritual, and reinvention.
