Eleonora d’Aragona (1450–93), the eldest daughter of King Ferdinand I of Naples and his first wife Isabella of Chiaromonte, was married by proxy in August 1472 to Ercole d’Este, who had just become duke of Ferrara. Over a decade earlier her grandfather, Alfonso V of Aragon and I of Naples (1396–1458), had agreed with Duke Francesco Sforza of Milan to marry her to one of the duke's sons, Sforza Maria Sforza (1451–79), who was later made duke of Bari. This marriage, which was not consummated, took place in Naples in 1465. Following the death of the Duke of Milan in 1466, however, Eleonora remained in Naples pending various disagreements over the terms of her dowry between her father King Ferdinand and her brother-in-law the new duke of Milan, Gian Galeazzo Sforza.

By 1471 Ferdinand managed to come to an accord with Milan: Sforza Maria Sforza was permitted to retain the duchy of Bari, and his marriage to Eleonora was officially annulled by Pope Sixtus IV. In the complicated politics of the Italian peninsula Ferdinand then sought to ally Naples with Ferrara and its new duke Ercole d’Este, a condottiere (mercenary general) with whom Eleonora must have been acquainted, since he had been a member of the Neapolitan court in the service of the king between 1445 and 1460. The marriage was therefore both socially acceptable and also a shrewd political move for both Ferrara and Naples. Eleonora's marriage as a princess of Naples represented an alliance between the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Ferrara. As a consequence, great political significance would have been placed on the type of welcome she received at Rome, Siena, and Florence, where she and her entourage stopped on the journey north to Ferrara in the late spring of 1473. Note would have been taken of the reception she was accorded, as well as the quality of the accommodation, banquets, and entertainments provided for her benefit. Eleonora's letters home during her journey contain detailed descriptions of her surroundings and a record of the dignitaries she met on what amounted to a state visit.

In Lübeck, Germany, there are two garments, nearly identical, that represent a unique style in armor fashion found only in Germany for about fifty years in the middle of the fifteenth century. They are thickly padded, with radiating lines of quilting on the upper and lower back and a painted surface that highlights the quilting. They also have a distinctive skirting that gives the impression of fur, but is, in reality, made using a curious fabric treatment. The garments have extensive damage to the front panels as well as the skirting, but despite this, they attest to a visually striking style that can be immediately identified in contemporary statues and paintings (figs. 6.1 to 6.4).

The story of these garments, held separately in the Museum Holstentor and the St. Annen Museum before their move in late 2014 to the new Europäisches Hansemuseum in Lübeck, exemplifies the compelling lore that can be attached to historical items, rightly or wrongly, and how it affects our understanding of these artifacts. With this paper I will document my findings from my examination of one of the so-called Lübeck wappenröcke. In particular, I will detail the materials used, the likely methods of construction, and the results of a chemical analysis of the black paint used to decorate the back of the garment. I hope to also shed some light upon the possible reasons for peculiarities found in the tailoring of these garments. As with any such study, more questions were raised by my examination that will need to be answered with future research.

FASHIONABLE FABRIC ARMOR

There is no generally accepted term that describes and applies to garments in the style of the Lübeck garments, but the museum's catalog refers to them alternately as wappenrock or Vasa-rock (the latter literally “Vasa's jacket,” after their connection with Sweden's King Gustav Vasa I, about which more below). Wappenrock (pronounced VAF-en-rok) translates most often as “surcoat” in the medieval sense, and as a military uniform coat in a modern sense. While it is true that this garment was intended to be worn over some pieces of armor, it is not so much a surcoat as it is true fabric armor, designed to protect the body from weapon strikes.

2016 was the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest of England, precipitating commemorations and conferences on both sides of the English Channel. It is fitting, therefore, that we should publish a chapter on the Bayeux Tapestry, a product of the Anglo-Norman period which depicts events leading up to the Conquest and the Battle itself. Gale R. Owen-Crocker accordingly examines “The Significance of Dress in the Bayeux Tapestry.” The Tapestry, one should not forget, is a wall hanging, a decorative furnishing fabric for a room, albeit a very large one. Furnishings are also the topic of “‘Bene in ordene et bene ornata’: Eleonora d’Aragona's Description of Her Suite of Rooms in a Roman Palace of the Late Fifteenth Century,” Jane Bridgeman’s discussion of an aristocratic bride's letter home in which she enumerates the splendours of the apartment prepared for her as a guest of the pope in Rome.

The later medieval period saw a meteoric rise in the cloth trade, with fabrics for all levels and purposes, which was accompanied by an explosion of terminology to describe, measure, and market it. In “How Long Is a Launce? Units of Measure for Cloth in Late Medieval Britain,” Mark Chambers examines terminology for cloth and fur measures in the late medieval British Isles, demonstrating the multilingual nature of business writing of the period. Commerce and its vocabulary feature again in Christine Meek's “Calciamentum: Footwear in Late Medieval Lucca,” a product of this author's ongoing study of the records of this Tuscan city (see Medieval Clothing and Textiles volumes 7 and 10), which gives a vivid picture of the variety of shoes, pattens, soled hose, and other footwear briskly produced and frequently purchased in this prosperous Italian centre. Everybody needed footwear, and references to it in the city records are frequent. In contrast, Jessica Finley's article “The Lübeck Wappenröcke: Distinctive Style in Fifteenth-Century German Fabric Armor” deals with a relatively rare item of clothing, the contemporary name of which is not known. Finley works from surviving examples and extant illustrations to establish how these defensive garments were made and assembled.

As readers of this journal recognize, medieval dress was a prominent indicator of identity, including gender, rank, and ethnicity. For this reason disguise is a device beloved of late medieval authors.

One of the first literary instances of donning attire to go incognito occurs when Odysseus arrives at Ithaca and prepares, with the help of Athene, a much-awaited return to his kingdom and his wife. Upon “changing his clothing into a shabby cloak and tunic … a large and well-worn hide of a nimble stag,” a staff, and a knapsack, Odysseus is ready to impersonate someone he is not. Odysseus conceals his identity by dressing down; so to speak, the king becomes a beggar through this clothing. Here, as well as in many other narratives and chronicles, sartorial elements are useful to communicate or to hide cultural identity and social status. Since the Odyssey was written, plenty of characters have crossed over lines of specific identity categories—gender, class or social standing, ethnicity, age, among others—through the use of textiles and other adornments.

Representing a different social status—rank, class, or degree—is a very common event in medieval literature. In Susan Crane's words, “[p]erhaps the most obvious function of clothing is to express and enforce standards of appropriateness … to mark social position, age, gender, season, and even time of day.” But medieval literature provides numerous examples of clothing signifiers also concealing a character's social status. This is particularly evident in chivalric romances, as Monica L. Wright explains, where “characters are clearly able to disguise themselves by wearing clothes that do not associate them with their normal identities.” These characters hide their identity or disguise themselves to perform (in most cases) a lower-status role that provides some form of mobility: They “dress down,” though social status habitually “shines through” despite the sartorial performances. Nevertheless, dressing “up” or “down” can also refer to other identity markers. Gender and social position are two identity categories often displayed within medieval narratives; yet in exploring courtly performances, Crane does not consider issues of faith or ethnicity. Indeed, Crane argues for an exploration of “self-conception” of secular elites, though we can further this understanding of medieval identity if we incorporate the representation of ethnicity or religious belonging.

The performativity of gender, social rank, and religious persuasion through sartorial elements in many medieval texts clearly serves to uphold the established hierarchy—what we often call status quo. Gender performance in medieval literature emphasizes the desirability of the dominant status (particularly maleness) and the privileges associated with it.

The record book known as the Liber Custumarum—which forms a large part of the Anglo-Norman records of the London Guildhall (Munimenta Gildhallae Londoniensis) —contains a very interesting reference from ca. 1300 to an apparent measure of cloth, seemingly in the form of a common Gallicism:

The editors of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary contacted us at the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain project with the hope of shedding some light on this rare technical usage of launce as an apparent unit of measure. The term appears later in the document as well, with less semantic framing.

The quest to identify and contextualise this particular usage has prompted the present study, which uses the resources of the Lexis project database to elucidate lexical items used to name some of the measures of cloth in post-Conquest British documents. It limits itself, for the most part, to the “official” languages of state and bureaucratic record keeping (Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English) and draws data from the various dictionary resources and works on material culture available to the compilers of the Lexis project database. This article attempts to classify, as briefly as possible, some of the primary words for measuring cloth available in official documents from the period and sets out vocabulary by types of material measured, whether numerically prescribed (or not), and by probable source of semantic development (for example: “cloth eponyms”: broad, drap; or, more frequently, “physical object, such as body part, of determined length”: aune/ell/ulna/etc., brace/brachium, foot, launce, etc.).

The Tuscan city of Lucca was ruled as an independent commune in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. As such it not only has its own records of political events, but also extensive holdings of customs accounts, commercial transactions, court records, and private documents. In these records footwear is both ubiquitous and elusive. Household accounts frequently mention the acquisition of shoes and to a lesser extent hose, yet in other sources in which clothing is listed, such as inventories or records of items seized as security for debt, footwear very rarely appears. Shoemakers and cobblers are among the most frequently mentioned types of artisan, but this is often in contexts that reveal little about the circumstances of their trade. There are problems too about the precise meaning of terms for footwear. The distinction between shoes and hose is less clear-cut than might be supposed; shoes could be made of cloth, and stockings might have soles. There are, however, a number of regulations, petitions, and contracts featuring footwear of various kinds, which convey a little more about its nature and the circumstances of its production. This article will consider what late medieval Lucchese sources can be made to reveal about footwear in the two or three decades on either side of 1400. It will proceed by discussing first demand and the acquisition of footwear, and then its manufacture and supply, particularly as shown through regulations and disputes, which can shed light on the nature of different kinds of footwear and the meaning of terms used for it.

Lucca unfortunately has very few of the ricordi or family memoirs which have proved so fruitful a source for fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence, but two, both of them relating to doctors, are preserved in the Lucchese archives in the series Spedale di San Luca. In the case of servants, it was not the practice to make payments of the agreed salary on a regular monthly basis, but rather to run an account which would record small cash payments and anything paid to third parties on the servant's behalf, with the totals being worked out every so often. These accounts frequently included payments to shoemakers for footwear, and can provide useful information on the frequency of such purchases and the relative costs of the various items.

Since the embroidered narrative frieze known as the Bayeux Tapestry depicts persons and events of recent history, it is often assumed that its architecture, ships, tools, furniture, and horse tack reflect contemporary eleventh-century life. Not surprisingly, the same assumption is often made of the dress depicted in the embroidery. The clothing in the Tapestry is manifestly different from depictions in Anglo-Saxon art of the garments of Christ, angels, and the four Evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who wear classical dress consisting of tunica and pallium and are generally barefoot. The dress in the Tapestry looks convincingly medieval; but when it is appreciated that some scenes are copied from models in older manuscripts, recognised that there were different artists at work on different parts of the Tapestry, and understood that artwork may show things in “shorthand,” there may be reason to question its authenticity. However, dress is a tool utilised by the Tapestry designer to convey status, gender, and, sometimes, character or demeanour of a historical person. The latter is not always unambiguous for the modern audience. The Tapestry does not exhibit consistent use of colour and details of dress; nor is there consistency of hair colour and depiction of features; apart from the aged King Edward, no figure could be identified solely by appearance. However, it is important to recognise that costume is sometimes manipulated for particular effect.

The ideas in this essay have developed over years, and many of them have appeared as details in earlier publications but have never been brought together in written form before. The result does not claim to be a description of late-eleventh-century dress using the Bayeux Tapestry to demonstrate it, though in some cases the Tapestry may indicate that “fashions” thought to be twelfth-century were already in existence in the eleventh; the essay is rather an examination of what the Bayeux Tapestry shows and a discussion of the choices made by the designer, artists, and embroiderers.

English Male Dress

The knee-length tunic is standard male secular dress in Anglo-Saxon manuscript art of the early eleventh century, such as the Old English illustrated Hexateuch and calendars, and, indeed, in earlier Carolingian art such as the Utrecht Psalter, ca. 800, and there seems no reason to doubt that this represents a garment that was actually worn in early medieval Europe.

Introduction

“The perfecting of ovariotomy has resulted in saving and prolonging the lives of multitudes,” the British surgeon John Halliday Croom declared in 1896. Croom was reflecting on an operation that had, over the preceding fifty years, irrevocably altered the landscape of surgery. In the second half of the nineteenth century virtually no other operation garnered as much attention in Britain as that for the removal of diseased ovaries, and during which the operation undulated between controversy and accolade. In the mid-decades those who performed it were frequently lambasted, ridiculed, and even condemned as criminals by opponents who considered its high mortality rate unjustifiable. By the 1890s, with a drastic diminution in the operation's mortality, and a rich archive of printed material now circulating among the medical community that showed hundreds of cases of the operation where the patient had been cured, ovariotomy had ascertained not just respectability but was viewed as emblematic of Victorian progress in medicine. The fruit of ovariotomists’ labor was manifest in the many numbers of patients who had survived the operation and could now return to a life free of ovarian disease. In 1877 Thomas Spencer Wells (1818–97), Britain's most eminent and well-known ovariotomist, gave the address in surgery at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in Manchester. In his speech Wells proclaimed that his ovariotomy operations alone had added eighteen thousand years to the lives of European women. Such sentiments fitted in with broader understandings Victorian surgeons had of themselves as a civilizing force, both an intellectual and a moral one, their life-saving work a melding of sagacity and selflessness, augmented by the fact that it was women—the wives, mothers, and daughters of Britain—who were being drawn away from the clutches of disease.

Looking back, the history of ovariotomy might initially be viewed as simply one more example of a typically successful medical innovation: the resistance its advocates encountered before improvements in the procedure, and subsequent acceptance among the majority of the profession, marked its introduction into mainstream medicine. Certainty as the first major abdominal procedure to come into practice, ovariotomy raised difficult questions about the propriety and management of innovation as surgeons began to venture into the peritoneal cavity.

Introduction

What counts as progress in surgery? And how are the advances measured? In exploring innovation in surgery, it is necessary to ask how innovations are judged, and about the mechanisms for evaluation. This paper will consider the changing methods of evaluating surgical procedures in the later twentieth century by following the fortunes of one alternative and especially contentious method, the placebo-controlled clinical trial. On first consideration, the idea of a surgical placebo may seem odd, or even unsettling. A surgical placebo trial involves fooling some patients into thinking that they received a surgical procedure, with the goal to compare their outcomes to patients who did receive the procedure. The technique entered the modern experimental repertoire as an exciting, if controversial, method in the late 1950s. It subsequently dropped from sight and was considered for a time to be perhaps fundamentally unethical. In the 1980s, however, the placebocontrolled surgical trial reentered use. The surgical placebo—or the sham surgery—is now in the early 2000s an accepted part of the experimentalist's toolbox, if still controversial.

The fraught history of placebo surgery is interesting for what it reveals about the introduction in the late twentieth century of new methods for judging the effects of surgical procedures. In a conventional version of this story, surgery over the last few decades has witnessed a competition between two basic methods for building evidence of effect—the case series and the randomized clinical trial (RCT). For centuries surgeons measured the success of a new procedure in the accumulated experience of use and gradually formalized this process in the mechanism of the case series. Results from a single patient's case, if promising, led to further cases until a convincing series materialized, providing evidence of therapeutic effect or its absence. Accumulating experience could lead to a registry of cases, creating a larger body of evidence. To generate a traditional case series, the surgeon had only to operate and collect results in a systematic, attentive way. The case series proved both practical and influential and remains, with subsequent refinements, a mainstay of the surgical scientific literature.