True 14th-century urban conduct was visually coded street navigation for women.
Evidence
When you go to town or to church go suitably accompanied by honourable women according to your estate, and flee suspicious company, never allowing any ill famed women to be seen in your presence. And as you go bear your head upright and your eyelids low and without fluttering, and look straight in front of you and about four rods ahead, without looking round at any man or woman to the right or to the left, nor looking up, nor glancing from place to place, nor stopping to speak to anyone on the road. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 650
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: The passage defines the preindustrial urban etiquette of the visual gaze — eyelids low and unfluttering, fixed stare ahead — as the earliest codified form of civil inattention.
- XREF: Directly parallels Simmel’s blasé attitude and contemporary civil inattention techniques, showing the gaze discipline has a deep premodern lineage and antedates mass urban anonymity.