Going naked as a sign? Well you did ask [tag]Caleb Fogg[/tag] and I need to begin with some context – so bear with me.
I don’t know whether you ever had Sumptuary Laws in America. We certainly had them in benighted England an Europe – they were there to dictate what people should wear (types of cloth, colour dyes, ornaments etc) and even what they should eat according to their rank in society. They were in operation from the Middle ages up until the seventeenth century – so I guess by the time the project of American Liberty got off the ground there were just becoming obsolescent which is why you may have avoided them. They were an easy way to identify social rank and privilege, and often were used for social discrimination. This frequently meant they were used to prevent commoners from imitating the appearance of aristocrats and sometimes also to stigmatize disfavoured groups. Ironically Elizabeth – in many, many ways a lover of liberty and no tyrant – beefed up the English sumptuary laws – but this was mainly to keep the rising Calvinist middle classes in their place by a fairly gentle measure (akin to her insistence that Calvinist Anglican pastors had to wear fine vestments at holy communion and not the stark black Genevan gown – although at first sight the tow edicts may seem contradictory)
Michel de Montaigne the Christian Humanist despiser of all cruelty and religious strife and proto universalist wrote of the French version of these laws -
‘The way by which our laws attempt to regulate idle and vain expenses in meat and clothes, seems to be quite contrary to the end designed … For to enact that none but princes shall eat turbot, shall wear velvet or gold lace, and interdict these things to the people, what is it but to bring them into a greater esteem, and to set every one more agog to eat and wear them?’
Well the poor and the rich live alongside each other at these times and not in ghettos – so the regulations of clothing was something that meant that the poor knew their place (even peasants knew this from the distinctions between their humble dress and the clothes of the landowners and clergy they interacted with). Not that the poor had much time for fantasies of living in fine palaces and dining on mince and slices of quince when they were always vulnerable to starvation from a flied harvest. No the idea of heaven for many of the poor in medieval and early modern Europe was the fabled land of Cockaigne where salamis hung from trees for the picking, and where there were barrels of salted tripe and bilge beer aplenty, and meat pies grew upon the rooftops. Peter Breughel the Elder, the Christian Humanist painter, who was a member of the proto universalist Family of Love Anabaptist Spiritual sect painted peasant scenes with wonderful and earthy compassion…But look out for those pies on the rooftops in his moral paintings – he’s satirising the land of Cockaigne gently here for he believed that we are justified not through faith but through love alone and that love is its’ own reward.
So into a very unequal and hierarchical society, often shot through with terrible injustice regarding the distribution of food, the New Testament was whispered in the common tongue again. ‘He has put down the mighty from their seat and has exalted the humble and meek. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.’ ‘In Christ there is neither male nor female, Greek nor Jew, slave nor bondsman…’ And every now and then –amongst Christina radicals there have been displays of Adamic nudity as a sign that those involved had regained Eden through Christ and now all distinctions of rank and service were redundant. I don’t think we should imagine these occasional outburst as lascivious at all, There may have been a lovely young body or two, but the ranks would have been swelled with naked old men and women, naked mothers who had just ,say, weaned their umpteenth child, men with starved bodies broken by hard labour etc. The first recorded outburst in the Reformation – which we only know of from the Anabaptist defamer Verlinde but is probably true – was that of the Naaktloopers of Amsterdam who in 1535 ran naked through the streets proclaiming the wrath of God upon the powers that be. Verlinde also recounts the story of rich Anabaptists who in the same year gave up their possession and clothes and climbed naked into trees to await the heavenly bread. Such stories of Anabaptist enthusiasts were I believe the origin of the slander that Anabaptists did baptising naked (and even if they did it would have been done with great dignity and modesty in the major sects).
Going naked as a sign recurred during the English Civil War – the Ranters and people on the wilder fringes of the movement that was to b become the Quakers sometimes did it. However, the mainstream a Quakers used more modest but just as socially offensive signs. First the men refused to take their hats off /give hat homage to their so called superiors – which often lead to them being set upon by angry mobs. Second they addressed all without distinction only with the familiar ‘thee’ and thou’ – the equivalent of ‘how are you doing mate’ in today’s parlance. In those times ’you’ was the dignified respectful form of address to a social superior; they refused to use this… This was not meant as an insult but as a levelling sign that all are equal in Christ.
Radical nudity was still going on in England in the eighteenth century – John Wesley had a disputation with some Ranters who were preaching in the nude. In Russia – quite independent of the European radicals (as far as i know) – Orthodox sectarians known as the spirituals because they claimed direct inspiration grew up among the peasantry in the troubled times of the nineteenth century. Nicholas Berdyaev the Orthodox Christian universalist has written a sympathetic but critical history of these sect – they included the sect that drank milk during Lent, the self castrators, the libertines, and the Doukhabors. The Doukhabors practiced and still practise radical nudity. They were persecuted under the Tsars and Tolstoy pleaded their cause and got then transferred en masse to Canada where there is still a community today. Every now and then they get restive and go naked as a sign in wider public places and sensitive policing is required .