“When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.”

--Desiderius Erasmus

Monday, August 16, 2010

A not-entirely-random costumey thing.

In the Italian cotton book (which I forgot to grab this morning so I don't have the exact reference to hand, but if I wait this will continue to not get posted) there is a 13th century German reference to someone complaining about the women wearing brightly-coloured short jackets.

The artistic styles in the time period I recreate are somewhat stylized and frequently quite iconographic such that there are many items of clothing mentioned in accounts and other literature that are not pictured in the manuscripts. And then there's this:


The scan is not the greatest, and it isn't as high-res as I'd like, but if you look carefully, down in the lower right there is a devil wearing a green dagged vest*. It could be padded. Now, this manuscript was made in Castile (it's one of the many Spanish commentaries on the Apocalypse) so there may be no relation at all to the abovementioned German jackets, but it was an interesting discovery nonetheless.

Devils commonly appear dressed in feminine articles of clothing that churchmen preached against, so it's quite probable that there were complaints about that particular fashion.

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