Clothing
Clothing
Sumptuary Laws. The boundaries of social and political hierarchy were delineated by the clothes one wore, and throughout the early-modern period sumptuary laws tried to prevent economically successful peasants from dressing in styles that the nobles considered exclusive to their estate. The laws that established these guidelines were established as early as the thirteenth century, when nobles became alarmed that a growing number of the more-prosperous peasants were beginning to emulate their betters by wearing colorful clothes. Because clothing, more so than in present-day society, was an important status symbol, peasants were only allowed to wear certain colors, usually gray, black, or brown. Peasants also were limited in the type of fabric they could use. For instance, in parts of Germany peasant women were not allowed to wear coats or blouses trimmed with silk. And such laws did not only apply to peasants; in the late sixteenth century, French king Henry IV forbade the wealthier Parisian bourgeoisie from wearing silk clothes in order to safeguard the social standing of his often poorer nobles. The average peasant, however, probably would not have been able to break such a law even if he or she wanted to. Historians should thus be careful when analyzing either statutes that intended to curtail peasant luxury or commentators who assailed peasant extravagance. The cost of clothes was relatively high, and thus most peas-ants chose, of necessity, to produce their own clothing out of materials at hand—flax or hemp or wool. Indeed, studies of late medieval and early-modern family budgets in German-speaking cities reveal that poor families concentrated the greatest portion of their monetary resources on food, drink, fuel, and rent, and treated clothes and shoes as items that could be patched up and passed down.
Peasants. In general, peasant clothing was quite coarse, plain, and threadbare, and was often infested with fleas or lice. Remarking on the quality of peasant clothing, the French philosopher Michel Eyquen de Montaigne could write, in the early 1570s, that a greater difference existed between his way of dressing and that of a local peasant, than between the same peasant and a naked New World cannibal. In Western Europe many early-modern male peasants continued to wear the older style of tunic that had been in vogue among nobles between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. This garment was so long that it came down almost to the knee. Although the nobility favored increasingly shortened tunics in the years following 1300, peasants, who had to toil in the fields, woods, and mines, found the longer tunic provided more protection, albeit a bit less flexibility. Yet, fashion is an aspect of culture that often defies common sense, and, in time, peasant men in
Western Europe began to imitate their social betters by gradually shortening their tunics as well, revealing more of the breeches. Ultimately the tunic itself was discarded as peasants opted for the jerkin, which, with its buttons and laces, could fit more tightly around the upper body, combining adequate padding with flexibility. Records of church visitations to rural Saxon villages in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries testify to the consternation that reforming clerics felt, as they observed peasant men dancing at night in such “licentious” clothing. But such changes did not occur throughout Europe at an even rate. Shepherds in the Austrian Alps, for example, were still wearing the long tunic, stretched down to their knees, at the close of the sixteenth century, leaving their legs bare or covered with leather straps. While even most peasants probably had a “feast-day” set of clothes to wear on Christmas, Easter, or to celebrate a wedding, it was often of the same material, and was not much better than their work clothes. The fact that such attire was handed down between family members over the years suggests that most peasants could not respond to current fashions. Inventories are frequently filled with expressions such as “torn” or “old,” revealing that even holiday clothes were worn and tattered.
Footwear. An aspect of clothing that clearly served to distinguish the peasant from his social betters was footwear. Peasant shoes were sometimes wooden, but were, more often, simple pieces of leather wrapped around the feet, made tight by lacing long thongs through loops attached to the leather strips. In fact, this Bundschuh, as it was known in German-speaking lands, became so associated with the peasantry that peasant rebels of the early 1520s adopted it as the icon by which they identified themselves during the series of uprisings now labeled the “Peasants’ War.”
Urban Poor. Like the peasants, the members of Western Europe’s urban poor wore clothes of coarse wool or linen, and even, in the most miserable of cases, canvas. Masters sometimes gave their servants adequate clothing as part of their salary. Other urban workers had access to spinning wheels and made their own clothes. However, those who were not so fortunate had to rely either on “hand-me downs” or on theft. Trial records reveal that during the great plague of 1631, Florence’s urban poor regularly violated both municipal statutes and health codes in order to prevent the clothes of relatives who had perished of plague from being burned. Inventories taken at death reveal that the urban poor, like peasants, did not own many pairs of clothes. One woman in Toledo left, upon her death in 1593, two small headdresses, an old shirt, pieces of an old blanket, and an old mantilla. Even these few items would have been worth about one-sixth of her annual salary. Because the urban poor were so scantily dressed, some cities, such as Basel, allowed charitable institutions to hand out charity gowns (LuxrocK) to the native poor.
The Wealthy. By 1300 a change in men’s fashion was under way: men’s tunics, once indistinguishable from those worn by women, gradually became shorter and were often turned up, granting more flexibility. This change, which took more than one hundred years to catch on, illustrates well the speed at which fashion changed in the pre-modern
SCANDELLA AND BEHAIM
The first item is a contract that records the possessions (mainly clothes) that Giovanna ScandeEa, the daughter of a northern Itatan village miler and carpenter, brought to her husband as a dowry in 1600. An orphan at the time of her wedding, her family had scraped by, even in difficult times, with the two mills which her father, at one time the village’s mayor, had rented. The list therefore provides a good example of the clothes a better-off peasant might own. The second and third texts are excerpts taken from the 1578 correspondence between the son of a politically important and extremely wealthy Nuremberg family, Friederkh Behaim VIII, and his mother, while he was a freshman at the nearby Altdorf Academy (an institution that could only confer the B.A. and M.A, degrees). The letters reveal that Friederkh was more concerned with his clothes than his studies. His family’s wealth permits him and his mother to take a much more nonchalant attitude toward replacing clothes than peasants could take. However, it is interesting to note that even his clothes are falling apart, The detail of the accounting in the dowry is explained by the fact that marriages were economic negotiations between families-not affairs of the heartland the clothing listed represented a considerable portion of Giovanna’s total worth.
Dowry (1600): One bed with a new mattress with a pair of linen sheets of half-length, and new pillow cases, pillows, and cushions; with a bed cover, which the aforesaid Stefano [her fiance] promises to buy her a new undershirt An embroidered shawl, with folds, A gray dress. A new linsey-woolsey with the bodice of reddish cloth. Another linsey-woolsey similar to the above. A gray dress of half-length. A white linsey-woolsey, bordered with white cotton and linen, with fringes at the feet. A blouse of half wool. A pair of cloth sleeves, light orange in color, with silk ribbons. A pair of sleeves of silver colored cloth. A pair of lined sleeves of heavy cloth. Three new sheets of flax. A light sheet (of flax) of half-length. Three new pillow cases. Six shawls. Four shawls. Three new scarves. Four scarves of half length. One embroidered apron.
Three shawls. One drape of heavy cloth. One old apron, one shawl, one of heavy cloth. One new embroidered kerchief. Five handkerchiefs, One mantle for the head of half-length. Two new bonnets. Five new undershirts. Three shirts of half-length. Nine silken ribbons of every color [sic]. Four belts of various colors. One new apron of thick cloth. A chest without a lock.
Letter dated 13 October 1578, from Friederkh
My trousers are full of holes and hardly worth patching; I can barely cover my rear, although the stockings are still good. Winter is almost here, so I still need a [new] lined coat. All I have is the woven Arias, which is also full of holes. So would you have my buckram smock lined as you think best? I have not worn it more than twice,
Letter dated 14 October 1578, from his mother
As for your clothes, I do not have Martin [an occasional household servant who could tailor] here with me now... but he has begun work on your clothes. He has made stockings for your holiday trousers, which I am sending you with this letter. Since your everyday trousers are so bad, wear these leather holiday trousers for now until a new pair of woolen ones can be made and sent to you, which I will do as soon as I can. Send me your old trousers in the sack I sent the pitcher in. As for the smock you think should be lined, I worry that the shirt may be too short and that it will not keep you warm. You can certainly wear it for another summer, if it is not too small for you then and the weather not too warm. Just keep it clean and brushed. I will have a new coat made for you at the earliest. . . . I am sending you some cleaning flakes for your leather pants. After you have worn them three times, put some on the knees. Since Martin is not around, I will have your old coat patched up and sent to you . . . [so that you can wear it] until a new one is made.
Sources: Carlo Gmzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin, 1980), pp, 135-136,
Steven Ozment, Three Behaim Boys (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 105-108.
times. Certainly there were shifts to which the social elite had to respond; in the final quarter of the sixteenth century, for instance, Spanish-style high collars edged with basic fluting were replaced throughout Western Europe by the white ruff. Yet, generally speaking, fashionable whims affected only the smallest number of people prior to the eighteenth century. During most of the early-modern era, noblemen wore close-fitting breeches, preferably of linen, which covered their hips and thighs. These breeches also served as a type of suspender which held up the long stockings that were also in style. Obviously regional and temporal differences existed. In 1575, for example, Paul Behaim, privileged son of a Nuremberg family, wrote his mother from Padua, where he was shortly to begin his legal studies, that “one should not live by German habits and customs in Italy. So having thought it over and consulted experienced people here, I have dressed myself... in the Italian manner.” In Renaissance Italy, fashion favored low-cut bodices, high sleeves, gold and silver embroidery, and figured brocades. Crimson was the color of choice, and velvet and satin the preferred materials. The famed Venetian writer Pietro Aretino mentions such attire in his 1531 letter to Count Stampa, quite pleased with his velvet caps decorated with spangles of enameled gold. This Italian style was, in general, popular throughout Western Europe until the mid sixteenth century. François Rabelais dresses the young hero of his novel Gargantua (1534) according to an exaggerated Italian fashion: a linen shirt with square gussets put in at the armpit; a white satin doublet; light wool hosiery, slashed in the form of ribbed pillars, indented and notched behind (to provide air for the kidneys) and interspersed with blue damask; purple velvet shoes with pom-poms and leather soles; a blue velvet cape, embroidered with silver thread; a half-white and half-blue silk belt; and a white velvet hat enhanced by a blue feather plume and a gold-plated medallion. Gargantua also wears a codpiece, a fancy article resembling an athletic supporter and worn provocatively over the hosiery. Even in the early-modern era, fashion served vanity, and codpieces became so large that Rabelais jokingly has one character, Captain John, carry a large prayer book inside his. Gargantua also dons the attributes of the social elite—unconcealed weaponry (he wears a sword and dagger), and a purse (exotically made from the skin of an elephant’s genitals). Weapons, like the codpiece and the money bag, suggested the potency and copiousness of the wearer, and, because these objects of fashion partly defined masculinity, municipal governments could shame reprobates by denying them the right to wear these items.
Transition. Slowly during the sixteenth century, the austere Spanish style that featured black costumes with close-fitting doublets, padded hose, high collars, and short capes began to predominate. In the seventeenth century the doughty French styles commonly depicted in movie versions of Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers (1844) emerged triumphantly. This outfit featured short, brightly colored breeches and large, down-turned collars made from linen or lace. Turks, noted the sixteenth-century Flemish diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, wore an ankle-length robe, covered their heads with a cowl, and wore a heavy silver gilt cone studded with stones and gems. In colder climates, such as in northern Germany, a gilded shirt might be worn under a fur wrap. Hooded coats with velvet borders were also stylish among the wealthy, as were camel-hair coats lined with fox fur. Finally, in Russia, nobles saved their finest clothes only for attending church, visiting or entertaining important people, and major public appearances. However, clothes were such an expensive commodity that even nobles had to take precautions, especially given the Russian climate: as soon as the appointment concluded, the noble would carefully remove his finest outfit and put on older clothes. Russian noblewomen were taught to store clothes carefully, to prevent them from smelling musty, and to dry them and brush them in certain ways. In fact, sixteenth-century guidebooks advise the mistress of the household always to keep the finer clothes locked in a chest to prevent theft. The dress of Russian noblemen was highly colorful and consisted of fine shirts and trousers, and, interestingly, of several layers of taffeta or brocade caftans that were elaborately decorated with ribbons, feathers, furs, and various types of cloth. Often they wore four or five articles of clothing of increasing size over their shirt and trousers—zipun, feriaz, okhaben (a garment with long sleeves and a cape), odnoriadka (only worn outside), and, in winter, a fur coat on top of all. Men wore hats made preferably from the fur of the black fox. Both men and women wore chetygi, which were a series of linen cloths wrapped around the feet and which, like socks, were meant to keep the feet warm in winter.
Female Attire. Women’s clothing consisted of a skirt, petticoat, mantle, apron, bodice, and corset. Over time, the style of the bodice became more close-fitting, and it was cut with a large decollete. Generally, women’s collars were open, but were turned down. Ruffs and headdresses varied regionally. Wealthier women wore silk clothes embroidered with gold ornaments, lace, and precious stones. In Russia, noblewomen wore knee-length coats made from the softest furs over jackets that were cut close to the figure and that had very long and wide sleeves. The overcoats often had fur hoods for protection against the winter cold. Because only maidens wore their hair loose, Russian noblewomen wore kerchiefs on their heads in summer and, in winter, a kaptura, a large beaver fur hat that covered the head and shoulders.
Disease and Identity. Early-modern Europeans, even peasants, changed their clothes occasionally, but at rates which would disgust most people today. Peasants and the urban poor, because they simply did not have many pairs of clothes, often wore the same articles for particularly long periods. For example, in the 1630s, a traveler to the Jura region of eastern France noted in his diary that a widow he encountered received from her husband’s estate one new chemise every two years and a coarse cloth dress once every three. Moreover, water, one of the four fundamental elements of early-modern physics, was feared because of its ability to penetrate surfaces. For this reason, clothes in western Europe were cleaned by beating, dry scrubbing, and perfuming. Interestingly, Russian women were taught to wash clothes and boots frequently. Given such suppositions in the West, the wearing and regular changing of underwear was crucial to hygiene, but the possession of these garments was a luxury not all could afford. In consequence, many of Europe’s lower orders suffered with skin diseases such as ringworm and scabies. Church-led investigations in sixteenth-century Saxony that aimed, in part, to determine whether or not villagers were still turning to “good witches” as healers—despite the prohibitions of the Lutheran reformers—discovered that the villagers contracted ringworm with such frequency that they refused to disavow their local healers. Urban beggars and other itinerants were forced to wear all their clothes at once, given their inability to store their possessions. Because of this practice, they were often resented and feared, sometimes with good reason, as carriers of plague and other dangerous diseases. Clothes were regarded as sites of contamination
and odoriferous agents that spread potentially lethal miasma (vapors). Hence, guards posted at gates in city walls tried to prevent those wearing particularly decrepit clothes or many layers of clothes from entering, not simply to minimize the number of the indigent within the city, though that certainly was a concern of early-modern municipal governments, but also to preserve the health of the populace. During the plague that ravaged Florence in 1631, agents representing the municipal board of health arrested and detained those citizens who wore certain types of clothes as carriers of infection—an early-modern version of selective targeting of suspects.
Concealment and Protection. Clothes were not only regarded as articles that transmitted disease; they served to hide disease as well. The early-modern age lacked antibiotics and most people were themselves scarred, but extreme deformity, caused by pockmarks, burns, scars, boils, scurf, or festering sores, functioned as a sign that alerted the viewer to distrust or fear the disfigured individual. Rich and poor alike were obsessed with disfigurement. Judges identified witches by their blemishes or moles, and even kings were victims of this discourse: the hunchback attributed to England’s Richard III exposed his nefarious inner nature. Deformed individuals thus had trouble entering cities as would-be immigrants, finding employment, or developing networks of social support. Clothing was therefore highly important as a tool of concealment, and this is a major reason that early-modern fashion covered almost all of the body’s surfaces. In an age when wounds took a long time to heal, clothing had to be designed in such a way that the body’s flaws would be hidden. Also, clothing not only hid imperfections, it prevented them as well, which was important in an age when even the slightest of cuts could produce life-threatening infections. Montaigne, in his essay “Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes” (1572-1574), attributes Europeans’ vulnerability to injury (as opposed to the sturdier condition he attributes to New World peoples and Moors) as an acquired characteristic made consequent by a culture that for centuries had demanded that the body be covered. As a result, clothes, in his mind, had become indispensable for the existence of many Europeans. Both of these functions (concealment and protection) became more important as cities became increasingly congested and “personal space” was reduced. It is not coincidental, then, that decorative gloves became popular among the wealthy who resided in those early-modern cities with rapid population increases, such as Paris and London. Early-modern fashion dictated that women of all classes covered their hair, just as wealthy men chose to wear wigs, in part to hide the effects caused by chronic malnutrition, by diseases such as smallpox, and by the scars and infections born of scratching lice infestations. In a related dynamic, the ruff became a popular style of the age because it highlighted the face, enabling those with relatively few facial blemishes to flaunt their beauty, and hence, their moral purity.
Criminal Intent. The absence of photographs and fingerprinting allowed criminals, vagabonds, and con artists to move from village to village and refashion themselves with relative ease. Clothing permitted criminals to hide certain identifying features, such as a peculiar scar, and, because certain styles of clothes were closely associated with certain professions, a change in outfit allowed those who wished to re-create themselves the ability to take on new personas. Recently discovered evidence regarding a skillful con artist and successful itinerant beggar who traveled with relative ease between northern German cities in the eighteenth century certainly would apply to the Renaissance and Reformation period as well. This contriver carried multiple sets of clothing with him, which, in times of real personal hardship, he could always sell. He wore a fine, respectable set of clothes as he approached a city wall to insure permission to enter. Once inside, he usually obtained a room in a quality hotel by appearing well dressed, and, once established as an honorable guest, he then slipped surreptitiously into his ragged begging attire to loiter around places, perhaps churches and upscale restaurants, where people were wont to give him their change. In a more famous incident, Martin Luther, after being condemned by the Diet of Worms, grew hair over his cowl and a beard, and replaced his monk’s attire with more secular clothes. Under this guise Luther carried himself as the Junker Jorg, resident of the castle on the Wartburg. While historians debate how successful Luther really was in hiding his identity, the fact that a figure as famous as he resorted to such dissimulation is telling. It should not come as unexpected, then, to discover that early-modern plays and stories focus to a considerable extent on characters who disguise themselves to gain advantage. William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1600-1601) revolves around the attempts of the impoverished knight Falstaff to swindle the burgher families by disguising himself in the clothes of a woman, while in Henry V (1598-1599), the title character disguises himself as a common soldier to ascertain the mood of his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. In addition, Margaret of Navarre’s collection of tales depicting life at the French court of Francis I, the Heptameron (1558), is filled with stories that center on how lecherous men and women disguise themselves as the spouses of others in order to seduce the would-be honorable objects of their affections.
Social Deviants. Clothing not only concealed; it also revealed. Social deviants were forced to wear distinctive articles of clothing that served as “signs” that publicized their presence to the accepted members of society, warning them of possible contamination. For example, an Italian miller, called Menocchio, was found guilty of heresy in 1584, and, though his life was spared, he was ordered to wear, for the remainder of his life, the habitello, a penitential garment decorated with a large cross that functioned solely to alert those with whom he came in contact that he had, like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1850), violated the laws and trust of the church. By the mid 1590s the miller had become obsessed with his symbol of exclusion, and neighbors testified at his later trial that he had wanted to visit the Holy Office to obtain permission not to have to wear the habitello any longer, as he was avoided because of it. During the time between his two trials he had actually discovered an interesting solution, and though he kept wearing the habitello, as he had sworn to do, he wore clothing over it, to conceal it for the sake of his business interests.
Utopia. Though Jews were not technically considered heretics, they were every bit as much “outsiders,” and they too were forced to wear distinctive clothing. In sixteenth-century Worms, Jews, both men and women, wore large yellow rings affixed to the outer garment of their clothing, prominently placed over the left breast; this was known colloquially as the “Jewish badge.” Diocesan synods in cities like Bamberg and Wiirzburg forced Jews to wear distinctive clothing as well. And finally, in his satire Utopia (1516), a book that condemned much of early Tudor England’s public policy, Sir Thomas More argued that the Utopians’ society was much more civil than the Europeans’ because on Utopia the mere thought of having to wear humiliating articles as punishment for criminal behavior deterred all but a scant few from breaking any law.
Sources
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, “The Structures of Everyday Life,” translated by Sian Reynolds, volume 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
Giulia Calvi, Histories of a Plague Year: The Social and Imaginary in Baroque Florence, translated by Dario Biocca and Bryant T. Ragan Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
The Complete Works of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1957).
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Steven Ozment, Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germany (New York: Viking, 1999).
Ozment, ed., Three Behaim Boys: Growing Up in Early Modern Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
Margaret Pelling, “Appearance and Reality: Barber Surgeons, the Body and Disease,” in London 1500-1700, edited by A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (London: Longman, 1986), pp. 82-112.
Carolyn Johnston Pouncy, ed. and trans., The Domostroi: Rules for Russian Households in the Time of Ivan the Terrible (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Jacques Revel, “The Uses of Civility,” in A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, edited by Roger Chartier, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 189.
Werner Rösener, Peasants in the Middle Ages, translated by Alexander Stützer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).
Otto Ulbricht, “The World of a Beggar Around 1775: Johann Gottfried Kästner,” Central European History, 27 (1994): 153-184.