Medieval "Lingerie" From 15th Century Castle Could Rewrite Fashion History

fangmcgee writes "Archaeologists have unearthed several 500-year-old bras that some experts say could rewrite fashion history. While they'll hardly send pulses racing by today's standards, the lace-and-linen underpinnings predate the invention of the modern brassiere by hundreds of years. Found hidden under the floorboards of Lengberg Castle in Austria's East Tyrol, along with some 2,700 textile fragments and one completely preserved pair of (presumably male) linen underpants, the four intact bras and two fragmented specimens are thought to date to the 15th century, a hypothesis scientists later confirmed through carbon-dating."

Comments

Re:Of all the things to hide under floorboards....

[JanneM]

Probably fairly valuable clothes at the time. Few people ever actually saw money in their whole lives; a dowry would most likely have been in the form of clothes, cloth and similar things.

Indeed

[Kupfernigk]

There is a reference in Dante's Comedy, where Dante is told that a religious reformer is coming who will force the women of Florence to cover their breasts. The rules varied, of course, from time to time and place to place (and often with marital status). However, I doubt bras were ever censorious. Censorious cultures expected women to flatten their chests under their clothes.

Many cultures do put the most absurd expectations on women. The desire of (mostly old men and women) to control female behaviour is quite uniform and quite depressing.

Re:Of all the things to hide under floorboards....

[silentcoder]

But in honesty - so was Shakespeare's and indeed all medieval and renaissance playwrights. The anachronisms have their origins in the circle-plays which were one of the few forms of theater that were allowed in the middle-ages under catholic rule. Peasants used to do Easter Passions with each craft guild depicting one part of the story - and they used to set the story in their own familiar circumstances. The Shepherd's circle for example is in medieval English and describes things from a contemporary rather than ancient shepherd's point of view.

These anachronisms were probably unintentional at the start but became traditional over the years.

By Renaissance times the tradition was well established and all playwrights gleefully used anachronisms all the time. Sometimes with clever plot points to sneak them in. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus uses magic to introduce time-travel in a plot which left a clear imprint on present-day Doctor Who - and so hides it's massive anachronisms (a medieval character meeting Helen of Troy) behind a clever plot - but even that wasn't always done, when the anachronisms were more subtle they were usually just left unexplained. So for example, in Macbeth, Duncan's two sons spend time at the court of Edward the Great, even though Macbeth is set almost two centuries before Edward the Great was even BORN (but Edward was a direct ancestor to Queen Elizabeth - still reigning monarch when Macbeth was written), the passage is a clear case of puckering up to the royal rectum rather than attempting to be historically accurate or believable.
So one could argue that any attempt to write in Shakespearean-inspired middle-English would be MORE authentic if it's filled with anachronisms since Shakespeare himself loved anachronisms.
Tom Stoppard (perhaps the greatest Shakespeare-expert in contemporary theater, also the script-writer for Shakespeare in Love) played on this beautifully when he wrote "Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are dead" - a play which posits what would happen if the two messengers that leave the court of Hamlet to visit England would arrive in the England of King Lear.

Re:Of all the things to hide under floorboards....

[silentcoder]

>Beware of the Grammar Huguenots.

That post had such potential... if only you knew history. The Huguenots fled persecution (In fact I'm of Huguenot Descent - that's my own family history you're talking about) - you basically said the equivalent of "Beware the Grammar Jews" when you meant to say Nazis.

Since "Grammar Catholics" has no time-reference, I suppose a good version could be "Beware the Henry VIII Grammar Anglicans" instead ?

The Romans already had bikinis

[photonic]

Maybe they found one of the first versions of a bra with a modern design, but already some Roman mosaics showed women wearing two-piece clothing, which isn't so different from a modern day bikini.