From time to time, the rather small amount of surviving medieval garments grows a bit bigger by favourable circumstances and a lucky find. And such a thing has happened fairly recently, at Schloß Lengberg (sorry, links will be all in German!) in Austria. When renovation works started in the building in 2008, archaeologists were making a spectacular find in the fillings of one of the spandrels of the vaulted ceiling: Lots and lots of small finds dating from the 12th to the 18th century - playing cards, coins, shoes, wooden, iron and copper implements, glass, paperwork and - be sure you are seated - garments. And these include underwear!

You can read a bit about the textile part of the find here, and if you do not read German, I still recommend to take a look at this .pdf, an excerpt of the magazine "Harpfe" - there are pics of some of the small finds, including a flute, and there's a picture of one of the underpants found in the spandrel.

When doing my daily bit of aimless link-clicking yesterday, I stumbled across a very, very interesting article via medievalists.net, titled "The codpiece: Social fashion or medical need?" The short version of the article: The development of the prominent codpiece might be closely connected to a strain of Syphilis running rampant at that time, with symptoms including swelling of the genitals and treatment involving local bandages that, in addition to the swollen private parts, have to go somewhere.

This, to me, is another proof that clothes and what we call today the "development of fashion" are connected closely to a lot of other areas of daily life, even to things like illnesses. Availability (or scarcity) of certain materials and colours, climate changes, influences by marriages in the upper crust, availability or scarcity of food, work or travel requirements and social signaling, age and wealth as well as fads in the smaller social groups one is involved in and, of course, personal taste all blended (and still blend) together to a complex influence on the wardrobe of each person in history.

This blend is so complex that we will never be able to pinpoint all its ingredients for a person that lived in history - it would probably not even be possible to correctly analyse the blend for a person currently living, I suppose, since a lot of the elements are probably not things said person reflects upon. However, that makes this article about a connection between illness and fashion even more delightful to me: There is another factor that can actually be traced by an interdisciplinary approach, adding more knowledge about the mix. And at the same time, this proves that a) looking beyond one's own discipline is a really, really good thing and b) that we can never be too open-minded when we are looking at the history of garment development.

By the way, if you don't know medievalists.net yet, make sure to take a look around - it's a very interesting page!

In addition to the nice stuff from yesterday, there's good news for those of you interested in the garments from Skjoldehamn:

Dan Halvard Løvlid has finished his thesis about the Skjoldehamn garments, and it is available as free pdf! You can download the file from
http://www.lofotr.no/pdf/Skjoldhamnfunnet/Nye%20tanker%20om%20Skjoldehamnfunnet.pdf

It's in Norwegian, but there are English captions for the pictures with some information.

Also available is an article from Dan Halvard about the connection between the Skjoldehamn costume and Sami costumes, available here: http://www.lofotr.no/pdf/Skjoldhamnfunnet/Skjoldehamnfunnet%20i%20lys%20av%20ny%20kunnskap.pdf
 
Have fun!

I distinctly remember having a handful of ideas for blog posts a few days ago - while in South Tyrol, and of course I did not take notes of these ideas.

Then I was back, and immersing myself in all the reading and all the other stuff that hopped around in my brain crying for attention, and gone they were, the little inspiration particles.

So instead of writing you some nice original content that might even have something to do with medieval textiles, I am re-posting you a heads-up that came from the Quilt History List over to another list (that at least has something to do with medieval textiles):

From the Quilt History List:

Dear friends of textile history:

The year 2010 is extraordinary for those interested in early quilt history. Not only is the Victoria and Albert Museum's Tristan Quilt now on public view in London for the first time in generations, but the sister quilt in the collection of the National Museum of Bargello and known there as the Coperta di Usella, will go on public display at the Museo Palazzo Davanzati, Florence, from April 24 to June 24, 2010 under the auspices of the Italian Ministry for Cultural Activities. These two quilts are known as rare surviving examples of all white figurative quilting attributed to a Sicilian atelier circa 1360-1400 (1). As such, they are key pieces in understanding the tradition of quilting from the Middle Ages to present day.

If you are not able to just swish over to London or if you don't even know what the Tristan Quilt is, you can have a look at some pictures here on the V&A website. Enjoy!

I hang around on a few mailing lists and in a few groups, and usually I just lurk in there and read most of the posts. Sometimes I wonder whether it would not be a smart move to unsubscribe from most of those groups and lists, since I don't participate much and since there's often chatter that I find distracting. And then, once in a while, a real gem comes up that makes me glad again about my subscriptions.

A few days ago, such a gem turned up on the 75years mailing list, a list focusing on the years 1250-1325. In a conversation about SCA baron titles (which I almost didn't read, since it falls under "chatter" for me), Michael posted a link to his flickr album with pictures from the St. Louis shirt.

In case you do not know about this shirt, it is said to have belonged to St. Louis and is nowadays in Paris. There was a bit written about the shirt by Dorothy Burnham, but as far as I know, there is no in-depth research published yet.
As Michael writes in his post, the shirt is in the Notre Dame museum, on display and quite easy to see - and no-flash photography is permitted. That is what he made good use of. You can see the photos here on his flickr page - and thank you very much, Michael!

A good while ago, I ran a series about medieval hairnets and netting, writing about my experiences and results from working netting both as a spiral and based on real rounds. And I wrote this:

I'd say that an unadorned, simple net might well be worked in a spiral, since it will take very hard looking to see that: In the crown section, there's too much thread on too small an area, and the lower end of the net, if stitched to a band or sporting longer loops for closure, will not be easy to read. For any net that will show different size mesh, colour changes or embroidered patterns, spirals are out of the game, because they are just irregular enough to show.

in that post back there.

For my suspicions about nets worked in true rounds because of colour changes, different-sized mesh and embroidery, I had a prime example in mind - rolling all those treats into one beautiful hairnet that I had already blogged about by that time - this hairnet:



I was, at that time, convinced that this so amazingly regular-looking hairnet must be made in rounds, not in a spiral.

Well.

I stand corrected, and many thanks to Cynthia, who studied the net much closer than I did. And gave me a heads-up on my error. Proof that I'm wrong (and that looking at the evidence much more closely than I did in that case is always the right thing to do) was before all of our eyes all the time, because even on that blurry picture, you can see that it was netted as a continuous spiral - if you look at the bit at around 3 o'clock:


Can you see it?

Maybe it's a bit clearer in this picture:


(This comes from HEINEMEYER, ELFRIEDE: "Zwei gotische Frauenhaarnetze." Waffen- und Kostümkunde 1 (1966): 13-22.) There's a jog right beside the upper edge of the little shield motif that is cut by the upper edge of the picture. The one without a partner by its side. And there might even be a single green thread going down from the last green bit to the next green bit, crossing right through the white bit. Which would be totally the thing to do if you couldn't be bothered to cut the green thread just for that little bit of white.

So much for netting in rounds... and I take back what I wrote, and now say:

While you might suspect that netting in the rounds would be more useful for nets with embroidery, different-sized mesh and colour changes, the busy overall pattern of such a net, made in fine threads, distracts the human eye enough from the slight irregularities of the jog that these are only seen when looking very hard or studying a net in detail.

(And now I'll wait for somebody else to prove me wrong again. Bring on your hairnet analysis results - I'm quite in the mood!)

Via the MEDTC-Discuss List, I got this information about a new exhibition catalogue:

Kusch, Claudia ; Patrizia Mignani ; Raffaella Pozzi (eds). :
Redire 1427-2009 : Ritorno alla luce : Il restauro del Farsetto di Pandolfo III Malatesti [Back to the light. The restoration of the doublet of Pandolfo III Malatesta]
Fano, Museo Civico, 2009. 24cm., pbk., 107pp. illus., most in color. (I quaderni del Museo, n. 2, 2009)
Price: $48.95 (Shamansky) also available through Italian bookdealers €22.50.


There's an article (in Italian) with two pictures, one a detail of the garment and one shot of the mummy in the grave. And I really want the book, though it could be a little hard to get it here - I haven't found a German distributor yet. So you are in luck if you are in Italy or in the US!