Vocatio 28 Charlatans and Vikings and Cataphracts Oh My

Hail Fabric Friends!

while the book on arming clothes and some other writing projects keep me busy, I keep finding fascinating links on medieval material culture. This November I bring you details of Italian armour, hair-parting tools, and sixteenth-century embroidery.

Laced Cuisses

Back in 2015, Gustovic noticed a knight with his cuisses laced closed in Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, codex 214 fol. 107v. I think Levi Pisetzky or one of the books by Boccia prints a few details in B&W. That whole manuscript and its many line drawings have now been digitalized in colour at https://digitallibrary.unicatt.it/veneranda/0b02da8280051c1c It dates to 1373 and is an Italian translation of the first ten books of Livy’s history of Rome. I have attached a screenshot of Marcus Furius Camillus as man-at-arms.

In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” Sir Gawain’s cuisses are fastened with thongs (line 579). That could be cuisses with a mail back that closes like a laced dress, such as Charles VI’s cuisses, or plate to plate, like the sixteenth-century greaves which have a gap at the side without hinges.

Charny’s Great Folly

Geoffrey de Charny was a good man-at-arms but a bad skeptic. He was fooled by someone who gave him a “shroud of Christ” that we now know as the Shroud of Turin. When he tried to display it as a relic, the local bishop ordered him to put it away and stop calling it a relic. When his son Geoffrey II brought it out again the bishop launched an investigation in 1389 and said that he had found the men who painted it for money (ever since the Church’s official position has been that you can call it an image of the suffering of Christ not a relic present at the suffering of Christ). Someone noticed that Nicolas d’Oresme, another scholarly bishop, uses Charny’s shroud as an example of “clergymen …(who) deceive others, in order to elicit offerings for their churches.” Evidently some people had been paid to work wonders near the shroud. Oresme’s treatise was probably written between 1370 and 1382 so is earlier than the investigation of 1389. You can find the details in an article by Nicolas Sarzeaud in the Journal of Medieval History, and press releases in places like https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/shroud-of-turin-new-evidence-fake-b2816240.html

Travel in the Middle Ages

The Getty Museum in Malibu CA has an exhibit on travel in the middle ages. This news article has some questionable tropes like “ordinary people never traveled more than a day from home” but I hope the exhibit is better. Unfortunately I don’t visit the USA under current circumstances. https://observer.com/2025/10/exhibition-review-getty-center-going-places-travel-in-the-middle-ages/

Groming the Hair in Late Medieval Scotland

Excavations at have revealed finds from the 13th and 14th century including a gravoir for parting or pinning the hair. This gravoir is made of the antler of a red deer (our deer never leave antlers somewhere we can harvest them, just poop). Reenactrix Rosalie Gilbert approves and is working on one of her own. You can see the original at https://archaeologymag.com/2025/09/rare-medieval-hair-styling-tool-scotland/

Was the 1351 Statute of Labourers Enforced?

Anton Howes of the Age of Invention blog thinks that the parliamentary statutes restricting labourers in England from taking higher wages or changing employers were actually enforced, whereas most medievalists think they were dead letters like the English sumptuary law. He has a long essay here https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-the-century-long?triedRedirect=true

I don’t know how to reconcile his claims with the usual estimates that real wages rapidly rose in England after 1349. He also makes the dread argument of the non-medievalist “they said this was the law so they must have actually done it.” When specialists in post-1500 history write about the middle ages it often goes badly.

John Harington on Apparel (1599)

In September I digitalized a letter from an Elizabethan soldier who describes what clothes soldiers in Ireland were supposed to receive each year. Queen Elizabeth was notorious for promising much and delivering less, so this shows what wealthy Elizabethans thought their inferiors needed rather than what was actually delivered. https://www.ageofdatini.info/fontes/john-harington-on-apparel.html

Sixteenth-Century Embroidery

Like embroidery? The Met has digitalized some of the pattern-books for embroidery such as “Eyn New Kunstlichboich” (1529) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/680717 and “Les Singuliers et Nouveaux Portraicts…” (1588) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/665819 Sometimes new books used old woodcuts but people in the sixteenth century were not always perfectly up to date on fashion either.

From Stockholm to the Indus

Neil Price has a (slightly overhyped) essay on Viking connections with Central Asia https://aeon.co/essays/the-viking-age-is-undergoing-a-revisionist-transformation I’m not sure I would recommend traveling from the Tigris to the Indus via Fars and Kerman but they didn’t have a Baedeker.

Which Town Came First?

Archaeologist Keith Wade has a book on which English town was refounded first: Southhampton, London, or his own town of Ipswich https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62e9qdpz1vo

The First Persian Miniatures

The Persian romance Varka and Golshah is the oldest surviving illuminated manuscript in Persian, and it shows Seljuk arms and armour just before the Mongols arrived. It has a crossdressing heroine and villains being pulled out of the saddle with lassos! Several miniatures are on Wikimedia Commons.

More Collections of Sources

Volume 2 of Ralph Moffat’s sourcebook on medieval arms and armour is available online but not yet in print. It has sheaves of darts and the other manuscript of the Treatise of Points of Worship in Arms. From the acknowledgements section, I think he is part of a British network of armour scholars which is different from my American, Canadian, and Continental European network. Full citation at moffat-arms-and-armour-sourcebook-ii.

The project “Material Culture of Wills, England 1540-1790” sounds like an excellent source on material culture even though the focus is more cultural https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/materialcultureofwills/ I am not sure if they are done correcting the machine transcriptions or if they still need volunteers.

There is a 2016 MA thesis by a Katelin Karbonik called “Clothing the Medieval Body: A Reconstruction of the Pourpoint of Charles de Blois” https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/972769c5-24b9-4b32-8b20-26cda9a35aea/view/f28313c9-3fb8-45f5-ac13-8f60fc1701fe/Karbonik_Katelin_202106_MA.pdf

Another SCA blog is https://medievalexcellence.com/ The blogger has a version of the Lenbgerg bra-shirts.

The Fingerloop Braids site is still online https://fingerloop.org/

And Christian Henry Tobler has published a new book on fighting in fifteenth-century armour with Freelance Academy Press. https://www.freelanceacademypress.com/fightinginarmour-paperback-1.aspx

Happy sewing! The dark and wet have come so I have a winter gown to finish and a bicycling cote to start.

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created and copyrighted on 2025-11-14 by S. Manning ~ last updated 2025-11-15