My earliest memories involve manuscript images of elegant ladies attired in attenuated hats reaching for the heavens and gracefully draping gowns that have a presence all their own. Having grown up in Delaware, I was surrounding by an embarassment of museum riches - the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Cloisters in NYC, the Phildalphia Museum of Art, the Walters Gallery, and the National Gallery - and we used to visit all of those museums on a fairly regular basis. I therefore spent my formative years immersed in medieval material culture, which no doubt instilled within me a fascination for daily...
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A smock in medieval English (known as a chemise, camisa, camicia, and Hemd in other European languages) is shirt-like undergarment, usually made of white or undyed linen. Longer for women than for men, it was worn specifically to protect the outerlayers of clothing from the evils of the soot, oils and dirt that build up on our skin - the white linen undergarments could be laundered at high temperatures with caustic lye and not be damaged by the process, unlike fine wool and silk layers, which would be destroyed by medieval wet laundering practices. But more than this, these crucial...
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This morning, I actually wondered to myself at what point humans started adorning themselves and their environs. I recalled seeing archeological finds of deocrative beads and necklaces dating back tens of thousands of years, not to mention wall paintings and then I recalled reading about shells found in Indonesia with deocrative carvings incised into them that date back 540,000 years ago - even Homo Erectus apparently had a penchant for the lovely! Certainly by the 15th century in Europe, there had long been a keen interest in both fashionable attire and fashionable coiffure, so here is a video in which...
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These days, line dances are very popular at DJed social events, from country to pop to hiphop. But this tradition of people dancing in a line, performing exactly the same steps and moves at the same time, dates back to centuries. Here is a fun video dance tutorial that will take you back in time!
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How did students in the Middle Ages and Renaissance party? Hard, but not in the manner you may imagine!
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