Nobles, cloistered and secular religious, and merchants, among other prosperous social groups, owned a variety of pets in the Middle Ages. Following the culture historian Keith Thomas, I use the term pet to mean an animal that lived indoors, was not eaten, and was given a name. Such animals included dogs, cats, birds (such as finches, sparrows, falcons, and parrots), squirrels, rabbits, hares, deer, badgers, smaller monkeys, marmots, and even bears. Kathleen Walker-Meikle suggests keeping pets was largely due to ostentation, signifying that the owner had room, food, and staff to care for them. From this perspective then, small pet accessories such as ornate protective bedcoverings, cushions, jeweled dog collars, monkey harnesses and mobility- restricting blocks, gilt chains and embroidered muzzles for bears, and birdcages and cage coverings symbolized the plenitude of material assets and luxurious household goods, thus emphasizing pet owners’ elevated social positions.

Though simple ostentation of this sort undoubtedly was a factor in medieval pet ownership, an alternative approach to understanding the proliferation of costly animal accessories may be through an exploration of the role these items played in personal or familial identity assertion in the material culture of vivre noblement. By this term I refer to the continual display and consumption of commodities through tournaments, crossbow and archery competitions (in the Netherlands), feasting with members of ancestral families, military service, gift exchange, and public celebrations such as entries and progresses, all to affirm and maintain the aura of nobility. In this practice, the keeping and display of pets played a significant role, and their accessories constituted a distinct form of medieval material culture—fashion for animals—in the ethos of vivre noblement. From the perspective of fabric, garment design, color, and use as insigniae identifying the wearer's social status and role as part of a noble's retinue, fashion for animals participated in the Northern European fifteenth-century love of texture, rich color, metal-fabric-jewel mixtures, furs, and identity-expressing badges. Fashion for animals was thus an additional means to extend and assert the pet owner's identity in society, especially among the new urban merchants and among nobles, where the process of assertion took place daily and involved the public or semi-public consumption of the commodities just mentioned.