The Late Medieval Chaperon in Documents
(first presented 27 April 2025. This page just a select bibliography and Q&A but no text; a more extensive bibliography is on Age of Datini. Thanks Håvard K. for suggesting iconography)
Primary Textual Sources
Pieter Nicolaas van Doorninck, De tocht van Jan van Blois met hertog Aelbrecht naar Gelre, Nov. 1362, naar het oorspronkelijke handschrift uitgegeven door P.N. v. Doorninck; Rekening van Jan van Blois 1361-1362 (Van Brederode: Haarlem, 1899)
John of Garland, Dictionarius: edited by August Scheler (ed.), Lexicographie latine du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle. Trois traités de Jean de Garlande, Alexandre Neckam et Adam du Petit-Pont (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1867), 24, 30; Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin, vol. i has another edition. This will be discussed in “Linen Armour in the Frankish Countries, Part 2,” Medieval Clothing & Textiles (in progress).
Sophie Jolivet, “The Construction of an Image: Philip the Good in Black (1419-1467),” in Jenny Boulboullé and Sven Dupré, eds., Burgundian Black: Reworking Early Modern Colour Technologies (Santa Barbara: EMC Imprint, 2022) https://doi.org/10.55239/bb001
Albert Lecoy de la Marche, “Le Bagage d’un étudiant en 1347,” Mémoires de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France (1889) 5e Série 10e Tome ( = Tome 50) pp. 162-182 https://archive.org/details/MemoiresDeLaSocieteNationaleDesAntiquaires50/page/n183 Transcription on Age of Datini.
Manuel Serrano y Sanz, «Inventarios Aragoneses de los Siglos XIV y XV», Boletín de la Real Academia Española 2 (1915) pp. 85-97, 219-224, 341-352, 548-559, 707-711 https://apps2.rae.es/BRAE_DB.html
Manuel Serrano y Sanz, «Inventarios aragoneses de los siglos XIV y XV», Boletín de la Real Academia Española 3 (1916) pp. 89-92, 224-225, 359-365 https://apps2.rae.es/BRAE_DB.html
Manuel Serrano y Sanz, «Inventarios Aragoneses de los Siglos XIV y XV», Boletín de la Real Academia Española 4 (1917) pp. 207-223, 342-355, 517-531, 735-744 https://apps2.rae.es/BRAE_DB.html
Manuel Serrano y Sanz, «Inventarios Aragoneses de los Siglos XIV y XV», Boletín de la Real Academia Española 9 (1922) pp. 118-134, 262-270 https://apps2.rae.es/BRAE_DB.html
Louise Sylvester, Mark C. Chambers, and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (eds.), Medieval Dress and Textiles in Britain: A Multilingual Sourcebook (Boydell & Brewer, 2014)
Prosper Tarbé (ed.), Inventaire après le decès de Richard Picque, Archevêque de Reims, 1389 (Reims: Société des bibliophiles de Reims, 1842)
The Paduan edict of maximum prices for tailors is Statuti del comune di Padova dal secolo XII all’anno 1285 (Padova: Tipografia F. Sacchetto, 1873) p. 282 §845 https://books.google.ca/books?redir_esc=y&id=Xl75sgLdt0EC. This will be discussed in “Linen Armour in the Frankish Countries, Part 2,” Medieval Clothing & Textiles (in progress).
The French edict of maximum prices from 1350 is Ordonnances des Roys de France … vol. 2 pp. 371-372 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k118158p/f399.item
The fourteenth-century illumination of a woman wearing her hood open at the throat from Crowfood et al. p. 191 is on Web Gallery of Art (original manuscript was destroyed in 1904 so this may be recoloured).
A summary of professions in the Paris taille of 1292 is Joseph and Francis Gies, Life in a Medieval City (Harper Perennial: New York, no date, first edition 1969), pp. 235-236
Secondary and Archaeological Sources
Fiona Beeston, “Matres and Genii Cucullati,” Corinium Museum Blog, 29 July 2021 https://coriniummuseum.org/2021/07/matres-and-genii-cucullati/ (not the best source but good enough to start)
Bertus Brocamp, “A Tight Fitting Hood with Armpit Straps,” Deventer Burgerscap, 1 October 2014 https://deventerburgerscap.blogspot.com/2014/10/a-tight-fitting-hood-with-armpit-straps.html
Elisabeth Crowfoot, Frances Pritchard and Kay Staniland, Textiles and Clothing, c.1150-1450. Second edition. Medieval Finds from Excavations in London (The Boydell Press: Woodbridge, Suffolk)
Q&A
Q: Have I worked with the manuscripts as well as printed editions?
Mainly for the arming texts which are my primary focus. I simply don’t have time to edit thousands of pages of medieval texts., and if nobody has used adequate editions in 150 years, a user base is unlikely to appear just because I produced a better edition. One reason I have not created a database or similar is the heterogeneous corpus, edited by many different people with many different goals.
Q: Can you tell us more about materials in extant medieval chaperons?
Information is available in the standard publications on Herjolfsnes, Boksten, and London (and summarized in encyclopedias such as coatsworth-et-al-clothing-the-past). We know all the ways these are not a random sample (wet sites preserve silk and wool but not cotton, linen, or hemp, the Greenlanders were very remote) but they help us understand tailoring methods.
Q: Could people be wearing linen kerchiefs or coifs inside their hoods?
Possibly! Terms like robe-linge are broad and vague. By the later fourteenth century the linen coif is a specialized garment for men and I don’t recall seeing many inside hoods in paintings. The headcloths in inventories seem to be bedding.
Q: Do you have any examples of worsted hoods?
Not offhand. I try to remind people that medieval cloth included fabrics which the English called woollens and worsteds without claiming that I can assign every type of cloth in a text to one of the two categories. Textile users in other countries didn’t always make this distinction clear like English weavers. IIRC there are flannel cloaks in the Spanish tailors books from the sixteenth and seventeenth century and perhaps one day I can make a list of materials for specific chaperons in my corpus. I look forward to more work deciphering terms for types of cloth where philologists work with archaeologists and specialists in spinning and weaving.
