A Public Service Announcement!

Archaeological Textiles Newsletter (soon to be renamed Archaeological Textiles Review) has just made Issues No. 46 and 47 available on line.  (From here, you can hit the link that says "Download Issues" to reach the download page.) One of the articles is unavailable for Issue No. 46, but it's good to know that ATN is carrying on with its stated intention of placing its back issues on line.

Medieval Women and Bikinis--A Coda

Engraving by Israhel van Meckenem (Wikimedia Commons)

Professor Beatrix Nutz, who is studying the late medieval undergarments found in Lengberg Castle, has written a short, informal article about the finds for the August 2012 issue of BBC History Magazine.  I was able to find a copy of the relevant issue at my favorite local bookstore, and read the article. (Pages 43-46.) Because the article contains some facts I had not run across with regard to the Lengberg finds so far, it seemed like a public service to post about the subject one last time before Professor Nutz's formal study of the finds is published in NESAT XI.

The most interesting information in the article is that, contrary to my previous understanding, there are a few artworks that show women wearing or donning underpants.  However, those artworks are invariably pictures of "a world turned upside down", as Professor Nutz says in the article,  or, more precisely, pictures showing a woman usurping male authority and prerogatives.  The 15th century engraving above (which also appears in the BBC History Magazine article) is one such image.  It boldly depicts a woman literally "putting on the [under]pants" while she lifts her distaff to hit her spouse with it.  Clearly, the issue of women wearing pants of any kind was already a sensitive point in 15th century Europe; apparently,  Western distaste for women in pants did not suddenly emerge in Europe in the Victorian era.  

Professor Nutz's article also discusses the fact that some 16th century women, at least in Italy, wore drawers. She observes that two royal Italian women (Eleanor of Toledo and Maria de Medici) owned one or more pairs. I knew about these undergarments, which were not bikini-like at all; they were more like Victorian pantalettes in shape. Bella has a selection of pictures of surviving Italian women's drawers on the Realm of Venus website.

So the idea that underpants in general were masculine already existed in Europe in the late medieval/early Renaissance period, and suggests that most women wouldn't have worn them--or at least, that a woman might not have admitted to wearing them if she could avoid doing so. 

Finally, the BBC History Magazine article notes that the bikini-shaped underpants I discuss in my last post were "repaired three times with linen patches, now overlaying one another." (Page 44)  Apparently (as one would expect with underwear) that undergarment was washed often and much used, which probably contributes to the absence of visible stains on the Lengberg bikini.   I don't know enough about the effectiveness of testing archaeological fibers to ascertain the materials present in a stain, but I suspect most underwear that is likely to be found will not yield much information from such a test, due to frequent washing as well as the passing of time.  EDIT (8/29/2012):  (struck in light of comment by synj-munki below). Perhaps Professor Nutz's NESAT paper will reveal whether any such testing was attempted on the Lengberg finds, and, if so, what information it yielded.

More on Late Medieval Underwear

It seems that a lot of people have been blogging and commenting about late medieval underwear lately, so a post collecting this information may be useful to those of my readers who are  interested in medieval costume.

One of my favorite costume scholars, pearl, recently posted a link to this short paper that she wrote about the photograph of a chemise that appears in Carl Köhler's classic work, A History of Costume. What she discovered is that the black-and-white photograph of a sleeveless "Chemise of the Fourteenth Century" that is now found in the Dover edition of Köhler was actually added by an editor during the late 1920s which, as pearl points out, explains why there is so little information about the garment in Köhler's book. Pearl traces the photograph back to Moriz Heyne, who says that the chemise in question, like the Lengberg undergarments, was found in a castle in Thuringia, Germany. Interesting reading!

Katrin Kania graciously responded to my questions about men's underwear in late medieval Germany in this recent post on her blog. It appears from Katrin's post that there are a small number of well-known pieces of late medieval German art that show some men in bikini-shaped garments like the Roman subligar. Some of these artworks plainly show men wearing a garment that closely resembles the Lengberg piece. not just in shape, but even with regard to the fact that it ties on only one side.

"The Men's Bath" (Wikimedia Commons)

After reading Katrin's post, I went digging for a bit more information.  I did not have any luck with searching the German-language art database she recommended, but I did find a number of underwear images in the costume guide of a well-known reenactment group, The Company of Saynt George. Pages 10 and 11 of the Company's costume guide for men (which can be downloaded for free here; the women's guide is presently being rewritten) includes about 12 different period images of men in underwear, with the sources identified. Most of the images show men in short underpants shaped not unlike modern "tighty-whitey" briefs, but there are at least two different images showing the bikini-like version. The Guide states:

"The Women's Bath" (Wikimedia Commons)

"Artworks of the period usually show two kinds with some subtle variations: A. Close fitting short like garments with a pleated "pouch" on the front. This style seems to be the most common type of braies. B. "Bikini" pants with ties appear in Swiss, German and Italian sources but not as frequently as the previous style."

So I was wrong to assume, as I did in this post, that the Lengberg "bikini" garment was female underwear. Moreover, as a commenter correctly advised me, there is no artistic evidence that women wore such bikini undergarments in medieval Europe. We see naked women in medieval German art from time to time, but not women in underpants. Here's an interesting example. A woodcut print and a pen-and-ink drawing by late 15th-early 16th century artist Albrecht Dürer highlights this interesting contrast. In the woodcut "The Men's Bath" (1507), Dürer clearly shows at least two men in bikini-like briefs; one standing on the left-hand side (he's lounging against a wooden pillar) and one in the middle of the picture (you can see the briefs, framed by the faces of the two men in the center foreground).  In contrast, in the drawing "The Women's Bath" (1496), we see women, most of whom are wearing headdresses, but are otherwise naked--they are wearing no briefs of any kind.

On the other hand, no one expected the bra-like garments found in Lengberg until 2008 when they were pulled from the walls of the castle. The blog Medieval Silkwork has recently featured two different posts about late medieval women's underwear. One shows period images of sleeveless shifts, with a high waistline, that are closely fitted through the bust, while the other discusses written sources that speak about breast binding and "breast bags." Both are well-written and illustrated, and very worthwhile reading, as is the essay showing the blogger's reconstruction of a fitted support garment similar to the Lengberg "long-line bra" garment, which can be found here. To me, the Medieval Silkwork essays suggest that the final chapter about women's underwear in 15th-16th Germany may not yet been written. The artwork shows sleeveless shifts, some of which likely were cut to provide breast support, but not garments that resemble the bra-like garments from Lengberg. Maybe the fact that the period art we have doesn't show women in briefs doesn't completely align with what women wore.

Now I'm looking forward even more eagerly to reading Professor Nutz's NESAT paper!

Artistic Perception Of The Past--An Example

The Pre-Raphaelite painting shown below is a famous, but incomplete work by Dante Gabriel Rossetti called Found, which is meant to depict a drover taking pity upon a "fallen" woman. Like many of the works painted by the Pre-Raphaelites, it is meant to depict medieval clothing, in a general way. This painting is interesting because, to anyone even casually familiar with modern histories of medieval clothing, it evokes the 19th century much more powerfully than the Middle Ages.

"Found" (courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Victorian spats*

Late medieval shoe*

Perhaps the most obvious anachronism is the drover's footwear.  Over very modern shoes with hard soles and stacked heels, he wears a kind of gaiters called "spats", that reach above his knee. One of the photographs below shows a more typical pair of late Victorian spats, but the style of the item is similar to the item shown in Rossetti's painting. In the late Middle Ages (the period Rossetti intended to evoke, judging by the drover's hat, shoes with hard soles and built-up heels had not yet appeared. The recreated medieval shoe shown on the right is more characteristic of a typical medieval shoe in style and shape than the "modern" shoes and spats shown in the painting.

The next item of clothing that is clearly not medieval in style is the drover's off-white garment.  This garment was called a "smock", and was still worn by farmers and other rural folk into the early 20th century, as the photograph of the man in the chair shows.

Tissot's The Confessional*

The fallen woman in Rossetti's painting appears to be wearing some kind of a fringed shawl or cloak. Although some early medieval cultures (particularly in the Baltic countries) wore fringed shawls, they are not shown in British artwork of the late medieval period. However, fringed garments looking more like the woman's garment in Found than like any medieval wrap survive from the Victorian period, and are shown in period paintings.  The fringed cloak worn by the woman in Tissot's The Confessional looks a lot, to me, like the garment the woman wears in Found. Moreover, the pleated cloth garment with a feather that appears behind the woman's head in Found looks more like the sort of bonnet worn by the woman in Tissot's painting than like any hood, veil, or other headdress worn in the late medieval period.

Countryman's Smock, 1904**

Finally, the woman's gown in Found bears a printed floral pattern.  Fabric printing does not appear in western European clothing to any great extent in the late Middle Ages, and the delicate floral pattern shown in Found would be beyond the fabric painting or dyeing technologies of the medieval period.

The object of this little essay is to show the peril of assuming that artwork from one historical period necessarily is a correct representation of the clothing worn in another, earlier, period. Artists in the Victorian period, though skilled as artists, did not have the benefit of information about medieval costume that we have developed, with the aid of archaeology, since the 19th century.   As a result, these artists had to draw upon their assumptions, or imaginings, of what medieval clothing had been like, or perhaps, in the case of garments like the smock, assumed that existing unfashionable garments were older in origin than they truly were.

*    All photographs from Wikimedia Commons unless otherwise specified.

**  Photograph of "Countryman's Smock taken by Gertrude Jekyll, scanned by George P. Lindow. (This photograph may be found here on The Victorian Web. This image may be used without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose.   More detail about the conditions under which similar images from The Victorian Web may be used can be viewed here).