just learned today that there was a german monk who was obsessed with witches and women having sex so he wrote an entire book called the hammer of witches where in one part he describes in detail that witches have the ability to make people’s penises disappear and they keep the penises as pets and feed them oats

i’m serious

Requiem with a marginal dragonfly  book of hours, Bruges or Ghent 15th century.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, MS 287, fol. 161v

submitted by @shilohta 🩶🩷💛

Sewing a turn of the 15th century French kirtle in doll scale

Another day, another historical doll outfit! This time it's Late Medieval. This was a popular style from about 1380-1420 France and Alpine area, but I specifically based this dress on French illuminations from the early 15th century, which mostly effects the details, like headwear. As always I hand stitched everything and stuck to historical construction methods as much as I could.

Ceramic inkstand depicting St. George and the Dragon, Italy, circa 1475

from The Victoria & Albert Museum

The return of George and his weak-ass dragons

Horse thoughts: I don't even gotta move for this one

"Here are some details of the incredible angel roof on the nave at Cawston in Norfolk. The roof dates from c. 1460. On the hammerbeams of the roof stand eleven six-foot tall seraphim, still with much of their original colour on them. Some have their hands in prayer, others in adoration. On the east wall of the nave at the same level as the roof, is the shadow in red ochre of the long-lost great rood cross."

Photographs and caption via Allan Barton

thrice I have opened my ipad to look at a pdf of hoccleve’s dialogue to check a particular line and thrice I have opened up tumblr instead because I immediately forgot why I was opening my ipad. augh

had to check it because this man was out here spelling "whether" as "wherthurgh"

"Then I said to her: “My lady, these examples show that long ago, the wise were honored more than they are now and the sciences were held in greater esteem. But regarding your words about women who are expert in the art of painting, I know a woman right now by the name of Anastasia who is so talented and skilled in painting decorative borders on manuscripts and landscape backgrounds that one cannot find an artisan to equal her in the whole city of Paris, where the best in the world are found.

She so excels at painting flower motifs in the most exquisite detail and is so highly esteemed that she is entrusted with the richest and most valuable manuscripts. I know this from my own experience, because she has done work for me that is considered exceptional among the decorations created by other great artisans."

Christine de Pizan (1364-1430), The Book of the City of Ladies (finished c. 1405)

Portrait of Christine de Pizan at work in her 1405 Advision Christine, bordered with decorative filigree matching the description of work by Anastasia.

it's funny although a little exasperating how artists designing "princess" or medieval-esque gowns really do not understand how those types of clothes are constructed. We're all so used to modern day garments that are like... all sewn together in one layer of cloth, nobody seems to realize all of the bits and pieces were actually attached in layers.

So like look at this mid-1400's fit:

to get the effect of that orange gown, you've got

the best I can tell you is that they were technically in a mini-ice-age during this era. Still looks hot as balls though.

Coats and surcoats are really more for rich people though, normal folks will be wearing this look:

so you know that ballgown look that people default to when making "princess" designs

this is kind of the fashion equivalent of when an AI has been trained to approximate what art looks like without understanding what it's drawing or how physics work. A costume designer has general recollections of about how the dresses looked from art, and a lot of the art they're learning from is also romanticized revival recreations of earlier art, so things are getting pretty confused structurally.

(I have to blame Disney for a lot of the specific trends but to be clear this was already happening before Disney was born.)

You can probably recognize how the gestalt of the bodice evokes what would actually be two layers--a gown laced over an under-gown, maybe with a stomacher in the same color as the gown.

The skirt is the very distant legacy of a trend that starts around here, in the early 1500's:

deliberately slitting the skirt of your gown so that it shows a triangle of the under-gown peaking through.

You know what a farthingale is? it's this thing.

Reeds sewn into the skirt to give it that round bell shape without needing 100000 layers underneath. Unsurprisingly invented in Spain, where it's hot as fuck. This is also the era where the farthingale starts its evolution into the eventual hoop skirt. You see that wide "ballroom" shape in a lot of princess designs. Princess Peach is a classic example.

Farthingale becomes hoop skirt, and using basically the same technology (reeds sewn into the fabric for support) the under-gown/kirtle becomes stiffened and shaped.

Eventually you get to this very pronounced version of the "slashed skirt" shown in the left figure, below. You can see that the red skirt is probably part of a whole dress, because the red sleeves in the same fabric are visible under the outer gown. (you can also see the chemise at the edge of the neckline). They did have detachable sleeves back then, as a standard part of a gown, so the red sleeves could be pinned to the chemise instead of attached to the body of the gown.

>Right figure, you can see this shit is getting elaborate now. I think that's a white under-gown with a yellow gown and a burgundy overgown. The collar around her neck is actually a partlet, not connected to anything else, just tucked in and maybe pinned underneath the neckline. But they're starting to have separate skirts now, so it's also possible she's only wearing a yellow skirt with the overgown on top it.

At this point whalebone is coming into the picture in a BIG way, and that's when you start to get Tudor style boned gown/kirtles tight around the bust really taking off. Also boned sleeves, if you can believe that. The smooth flat conical bodice is the product of a boned kirtle, which will eventually become stays, which will eventually become a corset.

anyway by now we're fully out of the medieval period and into the early modern/renaissance.

look at this bad ass bitch, hat ON titties OUT, who is doing it like her

I went to the ren fair recently, which got me interested in the specific historical inspirations of common “Renaissance Festival” clothes and consequently bugged my sister about her research so hard that it made us miss our turn

One common outfit you see (thanks to Amazon) is this modern take on the kirtle

On the left: Amazon. On the right: a recreation of what people actually wore. You can see how we have the same basic concept with a very different execution. This is what you would call a kirtle.

Another common ren fair look is the outer-wear stays. Always with the un-collared billowy undershirt.

I want to draw attention to the lacing. Stands to reason that costumers now would use contemporary lacing rather than that of previous eras. But check out even the romantic depictions of clothing from the 1870’s below this. No grommets. That’s just pure fabric baby.

Very few renaissance era women ever wore anything exactly like the ren fair corsets. For one thing, cross lacing wasn’t common, and metal grommets were not accessible to normal clothing makers. For another, structured stays (or “bodies”) were underwear, not outerwear. (Apparently something more popular with English peasants than French peasants, who didn’t use them.)

Left: stays (underwear). Right: jumps (outerwear)

Stays are boned. Jumps are not. Stays/bodies were pretty expensive due to the craftsmanship, and a poor person would have budget for a single pair. You can imagine this investment was not as popular with women who did hard physical labor. Jumps got really popular in the mid-1700’s and largely replaced stays in working class fashion.

A brief history lesson: clothes are ephemeral; we lose them as they are worn out, cut down, repurposed, and thrown away. Before modern anthropology and modern record keeping, it was difficult for anyone to know what anyone else looked like in the past or even a country away. Words used to refer to one kind of garment kept being used even as that garment changed in structure and purpose over time. Even after paper became common enough for printing art, it wore out fast and art was lost. References were hard to get.

What we think of as “peasant garb” is actually the product of a game of telephone that travels back from Romantic Revival art, and many of those (urban) artists got their idea of what rural peasants wore from opera costumes. The costumers working at the opera were not going out to the country side to take notes on what farmers actually wore, nor did they want to. Opera is show biz, you want it to be evocative, but not ordinary. Their costumes would have been based on what urban folks were wearing, with extra little touches like a shepherds crook to make it look “rural”.

Below: some mid-to-late 1800’s artistic depictions of peasants wearing improbably nice fabrics/clothes (probably a reflection of opera costumes). The painting of the peasant girl on the right is wearing more-or-less jumps.

You can see how the romantic art depictions of unstructured vests eventually inspired the “medieval revival” styles of the 1960’s/1970’s which lives on in the ren fair. Not only the neckline of the vest, but the style of undershirt with an open neck and billowy sleeves.

Compare (unstructured, laced, outerwear):

Nobody wore that in the 1400’s or 1500’s, but they wore things that looked similar at a glance. When 1960’s artists went back looking for early modern/medieval styles to replicate, they mostly had a hodge podge of this art to reference and extrapolate from.

The fact that a historical laced kirtle with an over skirt looks a lot like stays worn on the outside, probably made this confusing for artists. Undershirts of the 1500’s were collared and high necked, however, with tighter sleeves.(Below, 1500’s kirtle)

One last example of 1800’s romanticism, this time depicting a contemporary girl. Looks familiar, right? We’re back at the ren fair, if you take the bonnet off.

It does look similar to what was being worn in the 1800’s. Here’s a cartoon showing a working class woman in the 1870’s.

TLDR; what we think of as “Renaissance” or even “medieval” peasant garb is actually a remix of the working class clothes from the 1800’s, with some confused memories of the kirtle from older art thrown in.

Structured stays? 1500’s. The blousy no-collar undershirt? 1700’s. The cross lacing? 1800’s.

Anyway. This image of peasants has always been costume & fantasy. That’s why I think it’s kind of fun that it reaches a terminus in the anachronism and fantasy of a Renaissance Festival.

"Here are some details of the incredible angel roof on the nave at Cawston in Norfolk. The roof dates from c. 1460. On the hammerbeams of the roof stand eleven six-foot tall seraphim, still with much of their original colour on them. Some have their hands in prayer, others in adoration. On the east wall of the nave at the same level as the roof, is the shadow in red ochre of the long-lost great rood cross."

Photographs and caption via Allan Barton

i think women should get into polearms in a big way. not a lot of women in polearms these days. would love to see women doing battle with polearms.

So many sword women and yet so few appreciating the humble spear…

The devastating cavalry lance…

The imposing berdiche…

The zone-denying pike…

The elegant naginata…

The unforgettable glaive…

The ji, partner in combined arms…

Or the artful halberd…

Dont forget the powerful Bec de Corbin

The versatile Poleaxe

Or the often overlooked Guisarme

Shoutout to the artist of the Nine Worthies Frescoes in the Castello della Manta who gave their Margaret-of-Geneva-as-Queen-Tomyris a spectacular piece of weaponry:

Panels representing the English reformation at Binham priory norfolk

Turns out what happened is that the wall paintings, perceived as idolatrous by the Protestant Reformers, were whitewashed over and inscribed with scriptural verses; in the years since, the whitewash has flaked away, revealing the paintings underneath.

Marginal grotesques from a medival English chronicle.

Here bygynneth a boke in englysche tonge that Þat ys called Brute of ynglonde : manuscript, [ca. 1430]

MS Richardson 35

Houghton Library, Harvard University

This is probably the oldest surviving Valentine’s letter in the English language. It was written by Margery Brews to her fiancé John Paston in February 1477.

Read more of the story here...

Clonfert mermaid, chancel arch, Clonfert Abbey, County Galway, Ireland, 15th century.

photo by one Andreas F. Borchert

reflection of a horse on a fallen soldier's armor

detail of a miniature from the "anciennes chroniques d'angleterre" (vol. 1) by jean de wavrin, flanders, c. 1470-90

source: Paris, BnF, Français 74, fol. 161v