The unique disease: Plague

Posted on July 16, 2013 by Ruth

Plagues were different from other infectious diseases. A plague was an epidemic of a new lethal disease to which nobody had any immunity. The rate of transmission was rapid enough that people who did not have symptoms yet carried it to others, but in a classic plague, they grew sick fairly quickly and died within days.

Thucydides described the Plague of Athens in 430 BC, a lethal outbreak that killed about 25% of the city’s population during two waves. Scientists are still not sure what the Plague of Athens was, in modern medical terms. Pandemic diseases are often zoonotic, that is, they jump from an animal host to humans who are not able to fight it off. There is not enough forensic medical evidence for the Athenian plague to identify an animal host, though at the time they say that it came from Ethiopia. The plague had a powerful political effect since Athens was fighting against Sparta and became fatally weakened after losing so many people.

Rome experienced a plague around the year 164, and again as the Empire weakened. “Galen’s Plague,” named for the Roman doctor who observed (but fled) it, may have been smallpox. When the Emperor Marcus Aurelius died, Roman power weakened. Another plague came through in 180; it was similar to the Athenian plague. Roman power had effectively ended in Italy and the West when the Plague of Justinian struck in 552. Justinian was the Eastern Roman Emperor in Constantinople; his efforts to regain the older limits of Roman power came to an end with the plague.

Justinian’s Plague is the first one for which we have more general, closer to worldwide, records. We know that it touched most of the known world, devastating population in China (perhaps its point of origin), India, Iran, Egypt, and Europe, all the way to Denmark and Ireland. It returned in at least five waves, until about 715. During this time, there were some significant conquests that may have been aided by plague losses by defenders: the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain, perhaps taking advantage of sick Britons and Welsh, and the Arabs invaded the Byzantine cities of Damascus, Jerusalem and Alexandria.

But we don’t know what it was. It may have been the same Bubonic Plague that struck in 1347, or it may not. There isn’t sufficient evidence, because we can’t identify particular graves and bones for that plague alone.

What was Plague like, generally? Thucydides described a violent disease that nearly always killed its victims (he himself survived). It began suddenly, with violent pain and high fever. Within hours, victims broke out in sores. They coughed and retched; they had diarrhea and bled. They had spasms of pain or seizure. In some plagues, skin died, becoming black. The Plague of Athens took up to a week to kill someone, while some later plagues, including the Black Death of 1347, killed in as little as 8 hours.

Plague was simply the most frightening thing in the world. It’s no accident that Plague is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in Revelation. Diseases that rise to the label of Plague attack nearly all body systems at once. They mutate even as they spread, becoming airborne and sometimes defying logic as to how they are transmitted. The amazing thing is that plagues never kill everyone, although there appears to be no reason why they shouldn’t. When we contemplate the horrors of a 60% death rate, which is about the maximum ever suffered in a plague, we must remember that this means 2 out of 5 people never got sick, or were mildly sick and recovered. Their natural resistance to the disease is what eventually ends the plague, since after it returns several times, a majority of survivors have immunity.

Next we’ll talk about the exact plague that struck in 1347. It all started with woodchucks.

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Normal medieval sickness

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Ruth

We tend to imagine that plague was constantly ravaging medieval Europe, perhaps due to clever parodies like “Bring out your dead!” in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But most of the time, sickness followed predictable patterns and wasn’t out of control.

Infectious diseases could be chronic, more or less constant, like leprosy and tuberculosis. Modern medical knowledge tells us that leprosy and tuberculosis are both bacterial infections spread by nasal droplets from coughing and sneezing. Leprosy is also spread by armadillos, but armadillos weren’t a big factor in medieval Europe, in fact it’s safe to say that no armadillos had ever been near medieval Europe. People sneezed on each other, wiped their noses on their sleeves, and otherwise had no consciousness of the role of the nose in spreading disease.

Tuberculosis and leprosy tended to infect some of the population most of the time, rather than coming in short-term epidemics. Most people are immune to leprosy and many people fight off tuberculosis infections. These diseases were always in the background of medieval life, attacking people with vulnerable immune systems. They were a normal part of life, the way many cancers are today. We’re afraid of cancer, but when half of us have survived some kind of cancer treatment, it’s become a household problem.

Other infectious diseases came in waves of epidemic. Smallpox came to Europe from Asia, with returning Crusaders. It spread during the 12th century. Measles and St. Anthony’s Fire, which may sometimes have been shingles but sometimes described a more dangerous and painful skin affliction, came in epidemics.

They also had epidemics of intestinal-borne bacteria: diphtheria, cholera and dysentery. All sewage was more or less open to flies, since pit toilets at the back of a yard were the best sanitation they could manage. When the infectious bacteria of these three deadly diseases began to breed, many people got sick within a short time. Weather conditions almost certainly influenced the sewage-based epidemics. Heavy or frequent rain kept pit toilets from drying out or allowed sewage to flood into drinking water.

Malaria was another epidemic related to weather. Chronic rain and wet kept mosquito populations high. Of course, transmission had not been traced to insects yet, so they weren’t aware that standing water was the main issue. During the 13th century, many people dug chains of fish ponds all over France, Germany and even Poland. They were growing carp, a warm-water fish that moved up the Danube during the Warm Period, for fast-day castle and monastery tables. Malaria became a common illness near fish ponds and during wet years.

Leading up to the 1348 plague, the early 1300s were very cool and wet. Between 1304 and 1317, crops failed more often than not. 1315 began the harshest period of famine. Fields were flooded, dikes in the Netherlands failed. Seed rotted. Children were abandoned. By the time the food supply had recovered, about ten years later, between 10% and 25% of the population had died either directly from famine or indirectly from disease in a malnourished state.

The survivors of the famine period were not in good condition. They had been exposed to disease and depleted of fat and vitamin stores. They were also the adult population alive to face the plague when it struck in 1347-1350. Adults aged 30-40 had been born during famine years; they had been underfed during their childhoods. Their immune systems were poor, although they had survived contact with many diseases. Lean, short and often frail, they were not prepared for the greatest challenge faced in several centuries.

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Sickness in the Middle Ages

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Ruth

I’m going to start another series, this one on how the plague changed Europe. I’ll start by talking about ordinary sickness and medicine, then introduce how the plague was different. Then I’ll look at aspects of society before and after the plague.

It won’t surprise anyone to hear that medicine was not very effective in the Middle Ages. Herbal medicines could help a little, but the most effective medical care was ordinary care. Rest, food and clean water were the guardians against needless death. Of course, this implies that many people died from things they might have recovered from, since rest, food and clean water were perks that the poor didn’t have.

Early hospitals were mainly nursing homes for the elderly, and they were generally based in monasteries. Roman army camps had some hospital care, so places where Roman influence was stronger tended to set up health care earlier. Constantinople, the “Eastern Rome,” had tax-funded public hospitals for the elderly poor, but the hospitals also provided some sick and surgical care. The Crusaders who visited (or “visited,” i.e. sacked) Constantinople and its Byzantine institutions began to spread the idea of sick care. By the end of the Middle Ages, there were many models for hospitals.

Italian cities had the best health care. The average monastery offered the next best level of care, and Northern Europe’s hospitals run by religious orders came in third. York, England had the largest hospital in Northern Europe: St. Leonard’s, with 200 beds and lanterns left on all night in the hallways. Most hospitals specialized in care for leprosy, blindness, orphans, unwed mothers, or old age. But most of them ended up with orphans to care for. These orphans had a little school and helped in the hospital.

Most people recovered from sickness at home. Physicians visited the rich, herb women helped the middle-class. Recovery happened or it didn’t. Death rates from infection and infectious diseases were very high, by modern standards. Cancer was known, but it wasn’t common because something else usually got people first. If they didn’t fall into a well.

The infectious model of disease was unknown. Airborne spread of infection was understood as toxic air, not bacteria carried by air particles. Airborne infection was assumed, in fact; so hand-washing and other hygienic measures were ignored. When people died of an infectious disease, their clothing was passed on to the next of kin and generally worn without washing.

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Clothing at the end of the Middle Ages

Posted on July 6, 2013 by Ruth

There’s no firm line for where the Middle Ages end and the Renaissance – Early Modern begins. The conventional date is 1453, when the Turks conquered Constantinople. I’ve argued at times for the Black Death, a full century earlier, as the close of the era. Of course, to anyone alive at the time, there was no sudden change between 1430 and 1480. The same food and clothing continued through the period, even as the structure that had supported the medieval period was rapidly shifting.

Men kept their alternation between short and long right through the Tudor period in the 16th century. Hose was topped with short jackets, eventually called doublets and made of Italian cotton. Doublets’ fashion changed with the decade: sometimes padded, sometimes with exaggerated shoulders, sometimes with puffy sleeves. Older men often preferred the dignified long-robe tradition; the houpeland’s wide collar morphed into other styles that changed like the doublet’s variations.

Men’s hats drifted away from the hood-based chaperon (with its trailing liripipe), and toward a modern-looking hat with a firm round top and a short brim. There were two other hat styles that never quite left the scene: the bycocket and a soft baggy cap. We could argue that the bycocket (the Robin Hood hat) changed into the modern style of the baseball cap, since one of its features was a long brim in front that acted as a sun shade, and otherwise it was close-fitting. The soft cap was at times made of velvet, sometimes flatter and sometimes baggier.

The ladies adopted the men’s houpeland, with varying collar styles. Christine de Pisan is shown in a houpeland (and heart-shaped hennin), in which the neckline is close and the collar broad over the shoulders. We see many painted images of ladies at this time with the houpeland’s neckline open, belted at the waist and forming a V up to the shoulders.

Ironically, the ladies’ hat and hair style most popular just after the medieval period officially ended is the one most strongly identified with the Middle Ages. Through 1480, the most fashionable ladies plucked their hairlines and pulled all hair into a tight bun covered with the cone-shaped hennin. The cone-shaped hennin was not always tall; it didn’t point straight up; and its veil didn’t descend from the tip only. But that’s the image passed down to us in popular imagination, much used for Halloween costumes. The actual cone-shaped hennin could be tall or shaped like a flower pot, was tipped to point back, and was entirely covered with a light silk veil that was often pinned with a jewel at the forehead. The veil was large enough to cover the hat and drape most of the way to the floor.

There are two notable beauty traits from the close of the Middle Ages: receding hairlines and extended stomachs. A pregnant woman with a thyroid problem such that her hair is falling out would be considered just perfect in 1475. Women who weren’t pregnant sometimes put a pad under their gowns to create the effect.

Elizabeth Woodville, Queen of England, was called the most beautiful woman of her time. In her official portrait, we can see the marks of fashionable 15th century beauty: severely receding hairline, flower pot hennin with silk veil, and houpeland gown with a broad collar.

The Arnolfini Betrothal shows us the padded-stomach fad in the young bride and a new black domed hat on the groom.

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New fabrics: cotton, indigo and velvet

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Ruth

Cotton is native to India. When Muslims conquered northern India, they found cotton fields and production into cloth, which they sent back to Damascus. Egypt and Spain were growing cotton by the 10th century. Europeans at first used cotton only for padding out quilted blankets under chain mail armor or stuffing quilted winter coats.

During the later medieval years, the Po River valley of Italy became a cotton manufacturing powerhouse. Much raw cotton was imported from Egypt, but Italy began to plant it, too. But the home spinning system that was traditional for linen and wool never incorporated cotton. From the start, Po River towns used water power for mechanized spinning wheels. (While hand spinners felt that the spinning wheel did a worse job on wool and flax, it actually produced superior cotton thread.)

Italy’s cotton was simple utility cloth. It could be substituted for linen, which was still considered a finer fabric but which took much more work to produce. Europe began to use cotton underclothes, towels and sheets. Cotton took dye easily, so colored cotton was turned into vests and short jackets. The doublets of the Tudor era and Shakespearean stage were creations of Italian cotton. As a side benefit, daily use of cotton produced cotton rags. The paper industry was growing rapidly at this time, so rag buyers began to turn over a business in recycling cotton.

Europe had always used woad, the native blue dye, but woad had a few problems that made India’s imported indigo dye welcome. It didn’t dissolve in fabric dyeing vats until Marco Polo’s travel notes explained what needed to be added, so at first it was used only by artists. But by the 15th century, blues were darker and more color-fast. Black became the official color of mourning in the 14th century, so more dyers were creating strong, dark colors.

Velvet was the last major fabric invention in the medieval period, following the same path of introduction that other fabrics had traveled: from China and India by way of Damascus, Egypt and Spain, then into Italy, last into France and Belgium (a center of cloth manufacture). Velvet was made of fine silk; the trick of its weaving was to create two pieces of plain fabric that were connected very closely by fine threads. A sharp knife cut the two fabrics apart, through the short weft threads, to roll them separately. Each roll was like the finest, softest fur. It was horribly expensive at first, thus restricted to royal and high aristocratic use. It remained associated with royalty for a long time. When Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded in 1587, the execution team unrolled a large carpet of black silk velvet to absorb her spilled blood.

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14th century: short and long

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Ruth

Men’s fashion in the 1300s ran to extremes. Shoes often had extremely long points in the front, such that “pattens,” the wooden strap-on platforms used to keep leather feet out of rain and snow puddles, required long extensions to support the ridiculously long shoe points. People began to trip in the streets and some cities outlawed long shoe points. Men’s tunics, which had been stuck around knee length for centuries, now also went to extremes.

The houpeland was a fashionable, expensive coat with a long, full skirt/train, long full sleeves, and a wide collar. In fact, its notable broad collar was the first appearance of modern suit collar tailoring in a rudimentary form. Houpelands show up in paintings accompanied by the chaperon hat, the one that was made originally from a hood worn sideways. They also show up with tall, narrow hats that were the forerunners of the 19th century’s Abe Lincoln beaver/stovepipe hats. Everything about the costume blares extremes: extremely long, extremely tall, and extremely cumbersome.

On the other extreme, the newest garment was the courtepy, which has embedded the French word “court” for “short.” The courtepy was the shortest surcote ever dreamed up, barely covering the hips. Some were longer, some were barely there. A fashionable courtepy’s sleeves were often puffed, or slashed to show an under tunic’s contrasting-color silk. The courtepy was often padded and stiff, thanks to cotton’s wider availability for quilting thickness.

When men wore this super short jacket, their hose needed to become pants. Hose had begun as separate legs hooked to a garter belt at the hips, leaving the private parts exposed. Now, of course, tailors had to make bias-cut hose with a fully cut and stitched cover for the pelvis and rear end. It was part of their trend to fit cloth to the curves of the human body, as shown in the narrow gores of ladies’ gowns. Traditional Germanic breeches were blocky and tied at the waist, but the new full hose had to be tightly-tailored pants.

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14th century: evolution of the single-layer gown

Posted on June 26, 2013 by Ruth

Until about 1350, getting dressed meant putting on something colorful over a white linen gown. The design of the outer garment changed, but the basic idea was always the same, until the outer garment became more or less vestigial.

The last stage, in the early 1300s, borrowed the mens’ “Cyclas” notion to create what is now called a “sideless gown.” The sideless gown had a full, long skirt, but from the waist up, it was cut more like a cook’s apron. There were no sleeves, but rather just straps over the shoulders. It was open at the side from shoulder to waist. The sideless gown was a vehicle for display, not a garment to keep someone warm. The under-dress had never been so little covered, so it was no longer adequate for it to be plain linen like a smock or nightgown.

Once the sideless gown had elevated the under-gown’s importance, ladies began to leave off the sideless gown altogether. The new style was know as a “cotehardie.” It was like a modern dress: cut to fit the body, with long narrow sleeves. It was generally low-cut, exposing shoulders and upper chest. There was at least one feature no modern dress would include: large, vertical slits in the front of the skirt through which the lady could pass her hands to keep warm or lift the heavy skirt to walk.

The sideless gown, and then the cotehardie gown, were the lucky recipients of the heraldry fad. Brass effigies and paintings show both kinds of gown covered with embroidered chevrons, lions, fleurs-de-lis, and other insignia from coats of arms.

The cotehardie had two other unique features. Like a modern dress, it form fitted to the shape of a human body. Tailoring had come a long, long way since the days of the blocky, T-shaped Byzantine tunic. For a few years, form fitting had been accomplished with lacing at front or back; now, they built the skirt and bodice out of long narrow gores of fabric to be tight at the waist but flared below. The cotehardie’s sleeves were not wide or bell-shaped; they too were closely fitted. During the 14th century, buttons had been invented. The invention of buttons, by itself, spurred the new close-fitting fashion. Small, close buttons ran from wrist to upper arm, and down the back.

Unlike modern dresses, the cotehardie was then decorated with long streamers descending from the upper arms. It’s not entirely clear from etchings and paintings whether these streamers, called tippets, were attached to the dress or added separately. They may have been arm bands slipped up the sleeve after dressing. What is very clear from images is that the tippets were about four feet long and two inches wide. There doesn’t seem to be any use for tippets; they may have imitated pennants and streamers on tournament flagpoles. But every fashionable lady wore tippets down to the floor for several decades.

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The importance of heraldry

Posted on June 22, 2013 by Ruth

People have a tendency to emphasize and celebrate things once they have ceased to be important in an urgent, primitive way, because it’s only then that these things can become socially important. For example, when the railroads were first built, nobody thought to make model railroads. It’s only when travel by train has become unusual that we look back and say, “how grand the trains were! Let’s join train clubs.” War is the same way; while it is a fight for literal survival, it isn’t glamorous. But once a war has ended, or once a weapon is outdated, it begins to seem glamorous. Wars of today always seem gritty and unfair, while battles of the past have a hazy air of nostalgia.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, tournaments were mock battles for real war training. The melee, a mass fight that could range over acres of field and woods, often left men injured or dead. Tilting, in which knights rode at each other with lances, was real practice for the state of the art attack. Knights on horses seemed invincible at first. But by the 14th century, warfare had begun to change and knights were no longer the greatest force. The Battle of Crecy had already demonstrated that farmers with longbows could mow down the most chivalrous knights, and that’s not even talking about gunpowder. As towns grew, their guild councils got tired of being pushed around by armies of knights, so they designed pikes: spears even longer than knights’ lances, equipped with a spike and a hook to swing a knight out of the saddle as he road. Knights still carried the main burden of battle, but their peak was already past when tournaments came into their own.

14th century tournaments no longer practiced peak battle techniques. They were ritualized; the melee was less central and sometimes skipped. Tilting took place in lanes, for points. By the 15th century, the weapons were often blunt and symbolic. The really grand armor you can see in museums comes from the 16th century, when tournaments had completely lost touch with reality and were just medieval equivalent of polo.

From 1300 on, tournaments were about fashion and social standing. When tournaments were somewhat real, the only ladies who looked on were those who lived at the host’s castle. But now, young ladies became tournament groupies. Like Ascot and Derby hats, their dresses and accessories made the tournament special. And not just the ladies: men, too, still preened like peacocks and flaunted their gold and pearls.

Fashion with a tournament theme meant imitating the shields that heralds used to identify war dead. Once heraldry became less of a practical art of ID’ing corpses and turned instead into the MC’ing of events, everyone wanted a coat of arms. They wanted to dress like a coat of arms, so they began the particolor look to imitate shields. Men’s hose came as separate legs so it was easy to put on a white left leg and a red right one. Surcotes were half one color, half the other, often the obverse of what the hose was doing. Sleeves, too, could pick up the theme, turning the wearer into a checkerboard. Ladies often took it one step farther, if they were tournament groupies. With a gown split into two colors, they used embroidery to recreate the rest of the coat of arms on the gown. They became walking signboards for their family partisanship and favored knights.

The particolor look allowed guilds to play up their tradesman-heraldry. Each city guild invented a color theme for a special set of clothes. The uniform was called “livery” because it was *delivered* from the guild to each honored, avowed member. Livery came to mean “uniform of one or two colors” and often included a badge that was based on a family’s coat of arms. Guilds had arms designed for them, although they did not need shields. Everyone needed livery, badges, and heraldry signs.

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13th and 14th centuries: men’s hats

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Ruth

Men’s hats in the 14th century flourished, with some rather odd quirks that persisted into the next century. Men still wore the linen coif, the close-fitting cap that now most resembles a traditional baby’s cap. (Of course the baby’s cap is a holdover of the medieval coif.) The coif went under armor and even under other hats. But there were two new hat styles, in addition to some profession-specific ones.

The bycocket is a hat you’ve seen on Disney’s Robin Hood fox, and also on Dr. Seuss’s Bartholomew Cubbins, the boy who couldn’t take off his hat to the King because it kept replicating itself. It had a fairly tall peak on top of the head, but the real feature was a brim that stuck out like a point at the front. The bycocket had a brim all the way around the hat, but it was turned up close at the head. It only stuck out for a sunshade in front. Like the hat of Bartholomew Cubbins, bycockets could be plain for ordinary work, or fancy for aristocrats with tablet-woven braids, gold thread, or feathers.

But the really odd hat fad was the hood and liripipe. You’ll remember how the original hood was cone-shaped, but its tailoring was improved to fit the head better while keeping the cone’s point and, in fact, exaggerating it by making it trail off longer in a tube. The long tube, which hung down at back, was called a liripipe. Its length was a matter of personal style and decade-dependent fashion in the 13th century. But in the 14th century, someone in the upper classes decided to wear it with the face hole as a hat brim. Maybe they wanted to imitate a Turkish turban?

When the liripipe hat is turned this way, its long cone top or liripipe tub sticks out at the side, let’s say, over the left ear. Over the right ear is the floppy part that was supposed to cover the man’s neck and shoulders. The innovator who first turned a hood on its side wound the liripipe around the hat and pinned it, so that it was now a brim. Then he tucked the floppy part into the liripipe so that it stuck up and out like a giant broad feather. A new hat style was born: the chaperon. As odd as it sounds, this hat became the norm for men well into the 15th century. It lost all its practicality but, as so often happens, once it served no earthly purpose, it became indispensable. A role of fabric formed a brim and the liripipe could be tossed over the shoulder or draped across the front like a scarf. Here we see it on a bust of Lorenzo de Medici.

Certain professions and groups of men wore distinctive hats. Jews had to wear pointy yellow hats in many places; we find images of these hats in illustrations of the Bible, where Abraham or another Bible hero is pictured as a contemporary Jew in a weird yellow beanie. (Of course he’s also surrounded by men in coifs and liripipes, such was their idea of eternal fashion.) Scholars and doctors wore old-fashioned hoods, and as they went into the 15th century, they also wore bag-shaped silk caps. The modern graduating student’s cap is based on these hats, especially at the PhD level where silk caps and hoods are still common. Mummers began wearing caps with pointy “horns” that drooped or sloped down. Especially when made in parti-color silk, this hat developed into the “jester’s cap” we think of today.

Basic round hats and caps were also coming into use in lower working professions. One form had a brim all around for sunshade; we use many variants of this hat. Another was close-fitting with a turned-up brim. It sometimes had a “beanie” on top, which at the time was a practical feature: it was a little loop of fabric to use as a handle for removing the hat. Maybe that’s what Bartholomew Cubbins needed.

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13th to 15th centuries: ladies’ hair and hats

Posted on June 15, 2013 by Ruth

Until the 13th century, Northern European ladies’ hair had been styled fairly simply, usually in a long braid. By the middle of the 1200s, this was changing, and by the mid-1300s, upper-class hair was styled in fiendishly complicated ways.

It all began with hair nets, called crispines, crispinettes, or cauls. These nets were made of heavy gold, silver or silk thread, at first as a simple bag to cover the head. Hair was braided or coiled and pinned, with the gold net holding the braids in place. The barbette went over the crispine, and a headband or cap on that.

Since the caul/crispine was a showy head-dress itself, and it also helped hold hair in place, hair styles became more ambitious. The first notable development was the Ram’s Horn style made famous long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away by Princess Leia. Ladies of the late 13th century parted hair down the center and pinned two coils over their ears. Crispines covered these coils, and sometimes a kind of wimple was pinned or tucked to the top of them. The lady might have her hair covered only by the gold net, but her neck covered with white silk, now called a gorgette (Fr. la gorge, the throat). In a further style development, the coils of parted hair were wrapped in white silk that might cover the back of the head. If the coiled hair didn’t look just like rams’ horns before, once wrapped in white silk it certainly did.

Ladies’ heads began to take on a wide appearance. Hats slowly widened and silk mantles became oval-shaped to drape gracefully over the coils. Once a wider shape was fashionable, then even wider shapes were more fashionable. Natural hair was not enough, so some padding under the coils helped them stand out.

In the middle of the 1300s, the trend of wide headgear with side coils went to the next level. Instead of coiling hair around, they made the braids into stiff pillars on each side of the face. Most women didn’t have enough natural hair to fill out the proper pillar size, so they used extensions. The braids, doubled back and forth to make the pillar’s thickness, went into a gold hair net that was specially shaped to hold them. This was usually attached to a headband or crown. (This historical re-enactors’ site calls them “Templars.”)

By the turn of the 15th century, hair styles and hats were based on the idea that no hairstyle could be too wide. The type of hat begins to be called a hennin, but there were many types: this early one is known as the cross-tree hennin because it required a real wooden and wire framework. It was completely artificial; little natural hair showed and the cauls holding “side coils” were shaped like boxes. Writer Cristine de Pisan was always painted wearing something like this.

By the mid-1400s, the long horns of these headdresses were angled to point back as well as out, perhaps because ladies could not fit through doorways. Now the shape was of a heart, its structure was based on a padded roll of silk that ran around the top of the headdress. Sometimes it was a wide circle, flat on top; in other styles it sloped up at the sides like a satellite dish or cows’ horns.

1450 ends the Middle Ages in a technical sense, but to our eyes, medieval fashion lasted another 75 years. In fact, the best-known “medieval ladies’ hat” was developed in this early Renaissance time. The heart-shaped hennin turned into a hat made of two points that stuck out to the back, covered with veils: the butterfly hennin. The veils were often the points, stiffened with starch or held by wires.

After two centuries of extreme width, the hair styles and hats finally became narrow and tall instead. The two cones of the butterfly hennin came together in one tall cone that stuck as much backward as upward. We now see the cone-shaped hennin, often covered with a light silk veil that might drape almost to the floor. It didn’t really stick out of the top as in cartoon.

But times were in fact changing, not just in technical historical timelines. While court ladies vied with each other for height, expense and other extremes of butterfly, heart-shaped and cone-shaped hennins, the upper middle-class ladies of Flanders began wearing a much more practical cap. Based on turbans (now worn in Constantinople by the thousands!), the cap was round and close. It had no difficulty fitting through doors. The imitation turban cap really marked the beginning of modern hair and hat styles: next stop, the Tudors. (But my essays will instead turn back to the 13th century and look at how the rest of fashion was faring.)

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