As the blog software somehow refused to take the comment, I received mail from Beatrix where she tells me that it's not only fourteen, but 24 items on the list of occurrences in the article. 

Well, well, well. I had been so focused on the first page (which included the references to the re-drawn women's depictions) that I did forget to check the second page - where, indeed, there are more non-executioners, but mostly wrestlers and fencers. 

There are more executioners on the first page, but that does indeed shift things a little. There's definitely much fewer executioners in the later of the sources listed, dating to the late 1490s and later,  than to the middle of the 1490s (which is why I wrote about it being mostly executioners before), but overall it's a rather short timespan, and it would probably need more individual sources to see if there's a shift in who is wearing the pieces, or whether it is just a (random) selection effect.

Beatrix has also given the link to the digital version available on her researchgate account, so you can read it for yourselves.

Back in March or so, I posted the CfP about the seminar "Weaving Knowledge" - and now I happened to run across this: 

The conference is taking place on September 25 and 26, so the weekend after the coming one, and apparently there's an online attendance option. I have not been able to find anything online about it except the CfP, and the link written on the poster will take you to a registration page for the conference, also no further information given (nor in the registration confirmation email) - but if you are free on the weekend, and interested in practical aspects of historical textiles, it might be a nice thing to do.

Layered clothing is a thing in the late Middle Ages. There's been layers before, obviously, and there are passages in the Nibelungenlied that point towards some of the additional layer garments (like a cloak) being not strictly optional bad-weather garments for someone like a queen, or very high-ranking woman. 

But this is the first image that I have seen which very clearly shows two doublet-type garments worn on top of each other: 

This is a detail from a "Carrying the Cross" scene in the Bode Museum, Berlin, dated to c 1425. You can find the full piece and the corresponding database information here in the Berlin Museums Database.

The man on the far right is clearly wearing long hose or joined hose, and he is also wearing a doublet-like garment with button closure in the front that goes down to very shortly above his knees. Interestingly, the front is unbuttoned up to his belt, and the corners of the garment tucked into the belt. This reveals a shorter doublet-like garment, laced close. The guy to his proper right is wearing comparatively boring ringmail and a breastplate, and something under the ringmail which might have a sleeve that forms soft vertical folds, or the vertical lines might indicate some kind of padding and quilting (the garment from Chartres also has vertical quilting lines down the sleeves).

This is certainly... interesting. Very interesting. If these garment types were layered here, is that a common occurrence? Would something like the Chartres garment have been worn over a second doublet-style garment, then a ringmail? There are rust spots on the lining of the Chartres doublet which point to something metallic having been in contact with it. 

Only a shirt underneath the ringmail is theoretically possible, but might not be the most comfortable arrangement. We do have some few examples of laced-closed doublets that were definitely worn under armour (see for instance this article, and sorry for the paywall). So - how many of the pieces we see on late medieval paintings were worn solo? How many were worn over a second layer of armour, be it textile, metal, or both? 

It also adds some more interesting aspects to the Oswald reconstruction. Though due to time and budget restraints, I don't see a full ensemble of two doublets and the ringmail come about... 

If you should have seen anything similar somewhere, please do let me know! I am still all excited about this discovery and would love to know if there's more...

All the discussions about size, fit, and how to wear a sprang cap aside - one of the interesting side track things that I have realised is that there seems to be a rather narrow selection of who is shown wearing these caps, and in what context.

In their article "Enigmatic Beauty", the authors have a list of fourteen examples of headwear with sprang or net inserts. Some of these are shown as re-drawings in the article, some are only listed (for instance there are several occurrences in the Schatzbehalter from Heidelberg University). Interestingly, there seem to be almost only midwives, executioners, and to a smaller extent servants who are wearing these caps.

That is one of the additional instances I could find - and, again, we see an executioner.

So the logically following question is... why do we have the caps in these rather selected circumstances, and, at least as far as I can tell, rarely anywhere else?

Executioners are a sort of special person, as they are doing work that is considered dishonest. Yet they are still needed - and as a lot of saints get to be executed in some way, they are frequently depicted. Usually, they are wearing up-to-date fashionable garments, but they are also not the most positive characters. So are they wearing the caps in the images because they did so in real life? Or was it some kind of slander? Unfortunately, I regret sometimes these days that I didn't catch more background knowledge about art history, which would be helpful in things like that - but the executioners and sometimes some (male) servant wearing a cap like this does not point towards a high status, at least not as a piece of menswear.

If we look at the women, the scene where there's most of the depictions is the Birth of Mary. Here, we have a clearly domestic scene. Mary is on the bed, there's usually someone in the background doing something in the kitchen, and there are one or several other woman assisting with the birth and the newborn child. Notably someone usually identified as midwife - and that woman, sometimes wearing an apron, sometimes not, has this cap on her head - while Anna, the new mother, and the other assisting women usually wear a headcloth, or sometimes nothing (maybe signifying an unmarried status). Sometimes, the midwife has her sleeves drawn up, or wears a sleeveless dress (sleeves removed?) and her shirtsleeves are visible. 

To me, this gives the impression of someone partly undressing to do the work necessary, which would have been including different kinds of fluids that you'd not want on clothes more than cannot be avoided. She's not wearing the complete "outside" dress usually including several layers, and she's not wearing the full headcloth that is also usually seen. That full headcloth that, coincidentally, might or might not have been fastened to something worn underneath - because some constellations of that headcloth would require glue, magic, or, well, something to pin them to in order to stay where they are. 

I would be inclined to see the cap as an under-cap, thus, designed to sit on the head firmly enough (while hopefully still comfortable) to pin the rest of the headdress to, or if no pins were needed to provide some more friction between fabrics than between fabric on hair. That would also explain why we don't see it worn out and about by women, though they do sport many different kinds of headcloths otherwise. 

(I will be keeping my eyes open for more examples of this kind of headwear - so if you happen to know more images apart from those already mentioned, these are very welcome!)

Beatrix' comment to yesterday's blog post merits an answer. I was originally planning to do that in the comment section, but it is a little too long for that, and I ended up wanting images, so here's my reply.

In one of the articles published about the piece, a 57 cm head circumference is mentioned as the reconstructed head size for the cap to fit, which corresponds to an not overly large modern woman's head (I think the article is the one in the Collingwood memorial volume, "Crafting Textiles"). If one looks at the re-drawings of caps worn by women in the article "Enigmatic Beauty", the ones showing the back are all going down into the nape of the neck and are fully covered by the ties, with the sprang panel sometimes jutting out a bit (presumably to accommodate a hairbun). A very nice example is online in the collection of the GNM. In no case I have been able to find, either on the images referred to in "Enigmatic Beauty" nor on other images, the lower end of the sprang panel being visible; the ties always sit low, always cut across the sprang at its full width, and with the sprang panel pattern visible right above the ties.

Both the reconstruction and the original on the images in the "Crafting Textiles" book sit fairly high up on the dummy head, and the reconstruction is also shown from the back. There, it is possible to see the double-thread sprang passage just on top of the crossed ties, which is about mid-way up the back of the head. That is not what I would consider a "good fit" compared to the contemporary images. Coincidentally, if wearing the hair in a bun, this is the typical place where most of the hair mass would sit. Placing the ties just there makes the whole arrangement either quite uncomfortable or insecure, in my personal test results.

Now, this specific cap might have been worn differently, or on a much smaller head, resulting in a different fit, which might well have been the case, and so a 27 cm sprang panel might have been the correct full length. It might have been worn by a small child, for all we know.

But then the maths still does not add up. We have a full length of 27 cm of the complete sprang panel stated, measured from top to bottom. I assume this does include the double-thread passage at the end, as there is nothing mentioned anywhere to hint at this being only the patterned section. 

On one of the images published in the article "Linen sprang from Lengberg Castle", it is possible to measure the length of one of the lozenges in the pattern. I get about 1.8 to 2 cm, so let's stick with 1.8 as the smaller measure.

That pattern element consists of 10 rows, which gives each row an approximate height of 1.8 mm. The complete pattern has 186 numbered rows, as published after Carol Jones' reconstruction in the article "Enigmatic Beauty". There is one un-numbered row above row 1, which is a plain 1-1 row. (There are some numbering hiccups in the pattern, looking at the numbers on the side, but they even out.) In addition to these main pattern rows, there is the slightly wider row formed around the starting thread, and because the pattern holes in the image mentioned above only start at a little distance from that starting thread, there have to be two more plain rows before the pattern start (of which one would be the un-numbered 1-1 row in the pattern). Then there's an additional seven rows done with double threads at the very end, narrowing down the panel.

So we have 188 sprang rows, plus the slightly thicker starting row around the anchor thread, plus the seven double-thread rows. Even if we say all of these are no larger than the 1.8 mm found above, a total of 196 rows times 1.8 mm results in 352.8 mm - so 35 cm and a bit. Consequently, one thing must be incorrect: either the 27 cm total panel length, or the pattern description as given, with the 1.5 repetitions of the motif.

Which means either the sprang pattern length would need to be revisited, or one of the measurements somewhere has a typo or was erroneous (which we all know can happen, or, as the German physicists taught me, "Wer mißt, mißt Mist" because something can always go more or less wrong), or there is something else somewhere that would explain the discrepancies. I cannot say which is the case - only what I have found from trying to work the reconstruction as described in the articles.

Literature referred to:

Nutz, Beatrix, Case, Rachel and James, Carol 2021. A unique survival: A woman's fifteenth-century headdress from Lengberg Castle, East Tyrol. In: PRITCHARD, F. (ed.) Crafting Textiles: Tablet Weaving, Sprang, Lace and Other Techniques from the Bronze Age to the Early 17th Century. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Case, Rachel, Nutz, Beatrix and James, Carol. 2019. Enigmatic Beauty. The Decorative Headwear of Lengberg Castle.

You remember the Lengberg Sprang cap project? Something about the sprang panel has somehow kept nagging, especially the difference between the length I had at the end with my piece and the original length as stated in the article. So... I have started it once more, and it does look like I'm at the same density now. 

There's also a difference between the pattern given in the article "Enigmatic Beauty" and the pattern shown on the photograph; there is a hole missing in the pattern to form one more lozenge instead of a solid diagonal. I only noticed because I had measured said lozenge on the photograph to find out how long it was in the original (20 mm) and then I had progressed beyond that area in my piece and went to measure the lozenge and... it wasn't there. 

Cue an unsuccessful try to spot-fix, a complete unraveling, and a startover, this time with the amended pattern. And yes, my specimen measures 20 mm to the end of the lozenge. So... whew.

However... however, this also means that a pattern with one and a half repeats of the tree of life, with its 120 or so rows, cannot be done in 27 cm of length. If I do the maths on that, I end up with something around 40 cm of length. Which would, actually, be a much better fit for the head of a fully grown woman, as the cap I made stopping at the 27 cm length ends up with the lower edge of the sprang panel on the middle of my back of head. In contrast, the images showing these caps are always reaching down to the nape of the neck, where the end of the inset is covered with the bands crossing over. I can do the covering with crossing, but it's way further up, and takes some fiddling, and even then it's not a really nice fit and really nice coverage.

So something about the numbers seens to be amiss in that article, especially as the numbers listed in the text and the schematic drawings also do not match everywhere. The sprang was fragmented, but it must have been complete enough to read out the 1.5 pattern repeats of the motif, so it cannot have been totally fragmented, which makes me wonder what happened to give these measurements that do not seem to fit together.

For now, I will assume that the 1.5 pattern repeats are correct, and I will follow through until I have the full length of the panel as stated in the text - and then I will have a look at how the linen pieces will have to look to fit it, and how that compares with the original cap.

To my very great delight, the fig bush (tree would be rather generous) in front of our garage wall is actually bearing a good number of figs this year, and they (the late batch) are currently ripening - at least some of them. Now I only have to hold out long enough for the individual ones to really, fully, properly ripen... I've managed to pluck a few already that would have benefitted from a day or three longer on the branch. But, well, figs!

Also good, though I'm still not holding my breath: Apparently there is a German request for the EU to change regulations for the PPWR, including a moratorium on the authorised representative and Europe-wide thresholds for the small players. I am hoping this will go through, and we will finally have a sensible regulation. (Maybe some of the politicians have found out that some of their own preferred stuff is not coming anymore? Who knows. And actually, I don't really care why, as long as they arrive at a sensible solution!)