This article was accepted into the corpus but its outbound wikilinks were never NER-processed — typical at the deepest BFS hop or when the run's entity cap was reached. No expansion funnel to show.
| Guises | |
|---|---|
| Name | Guises |
| Type | Customary practices |
| Region | Broad |
| Origin | Varied |
Guises are forms of clothing, masks, or adopted personae used to conceal identity, perform roles, or participate in ceremonies. They appear across societies in rituals, festivals, theatrical traditions, and tactical deception, intersecting with figures and institutions from antiquity to contemporary media. Scholars trace guises in sources ranging from legal codes and liturgical texts to plays, paintings, and film archives.
The term derives from Middle English and Old French usage connected to dress and manner; philologists compare it with entries in the Oxford English Dictionary, studies by the British Library, and etymological treatments found alongside discussions of Old French language, Middle English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, Henry Sweet, James Murray, and the Philological Society. Comparative work cites parallels in Old Norse language, Old High German, Latin literature, Renaissance humanism, Jacob Grimm, and lexicons used by the Académie française and the Real Academia Española.
Guises feature in accounts of pre-Christian festivals recorded by Tacitus, Pliny the Elder, and chroniclers associated with the Byzantine Empire, the Carolingian Empire, the Viking Age, and the High Middle Ages. Medieval European practices appear in legal records of the Hundred Years' War, parish registers preserved in the Domesday Book tradition, and civic ordinances promulgated by authorities such as the City of London Corporation, the Hanoverian monarchy, and the courts of the Duchy of Normandy. Colonization-era encounters involving Spanish Empire, Portuguese Empire, British Empire, and French colonialism brought guising into contact zones discussed by historians like Edward Said and archivists at the National Archives (UK), Archives Nationales (France), and the Library of Congress.
Ritual guises appear in seasonal festivals linked to Samhain, Carnival, Mardi Gras, All Hallows' Eve, and indigenous observances documented by ethnographers such as Bronisław Malinowski, Margaret Mead, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and institutions like the Smithsonian Institution. Traditions include mumming in the British Isles, wassailing in England, masquerade balls patronized by the House of Medici and recorded in the archives of Venice, and processions associated with Dia de los Muertos, Obon, and Holi as chronicled by researchers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, and the Museo Nacional de Antropología (Mexico). Performance practitioners and folklorists compare regional variants collected by the Folklore Society, the Irish Folklore Commission, and the Scottish National Museum.
Stage and screen have institutionalized guising through traditions linked to Commedia dell'arte, Kabuki, Noh, Elizabethan theatre, and modern cinema produced by studios like Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Studio Ghibli, and Toho. Playwrights and directors—from William Shakespeare, Molière, Bertolt Brecht, and Anton Chekhov to Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, and Greta Gerwig—use disguise as a plot device, as do novelists such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison. Academic programs at Juilliard School, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Tisch School of the Arts, and film festivals like Cannes Film Festival examine guising in dramaturgy and performance studies.
Legal frameworks address disguised identity in statutes, case law, and treaties including matters overseen by institutions like the International Criminal Court, the European Court of Human Rights, the United Nations, and national bodies such as the Supreme Court of the United States and the European Union. Debates engage philosophers and ethicists such as Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and legal scholars from the American Bar Association and the International Commission of Jurists on consent, fraud, and anonymity. Historical episodes—from espionage in the Cold War, operations by MI6, CIA, and KGB to corporate compliance cases adjudicated under statutes like the Patriot Act—illuminate tensions between privacy, security, and theatrical deception.
Artists and writers have used guises as symbols in works housed in collections at the Louvre, Tate Modern, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Uffizi Gallery. Painters such as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet, and Pablo Picasso explored masked identity; poets and authors including Sappho, Homer, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, and James Joyce treated disguise as motif. Critical theory from figures like Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Spivak has informed readings of guising in semiotics, while museum catalogues and monographs from publishers like Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press document visual and textual representations.
Contemporary manifestations include cosplay at conventions like San Diego Comic-Con and Dragon Con, Halloween commercialization tracked by analysts at NPD Group and retailers such as Walmart and Target, and reality television formats produced by BBC, Netflix, HBO, and FOX that feature hidden identities. Digital avatars and anonymous profiles on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, and the PlayStation Network continue traditions of persona adoption discussed in scholarship from MIT Press and Stanford University Press, while debates on platform moderation involve regulators such as the Federal Communications Commission and the European Commission.
Category:Cultural practices