The Curious Frau

Mobile test post

So, I got a tablet for my up coming trip to Germany,  and this is a test post.

Yay! It works!

The Bohemian Reformation and Religious Practice

Yes, I'm on the hunt for a source, so I keep finding all SORTS of interesting things, which aren't exactly what I'm looking for, but are too good not to share!

The Bohemain Reformation and Religious Practice "is a series of biennial conferences dedicated to the study of the Bohemian Reformation."  and thankfully, they have put all of their conference proceedings online. :)  There's some really great sources in there if Bohemia is your area of interest. 

Medieval Memoria Online (from the Netherlands)

I know I mainly keep to German topics, but this was just too cool not to share. There's a project out of the Netherlands called the Medieval Memoria Online (MeMO) to "help scholars in carrying out research into memoria during the period up to the Reformation (c. 1580) in the area that is the present-day country of the Netherlands."

To assist memoria scholars MeMO has therefore catalogued the following different types of sources:

• memorial registers
• narrative sources regarding medieval memorial practices
• memorial images
• tomb monuments and tomb slabs

These sources have been described in great detail in two databases that will be part of the online application; one concerning the written texts and one concerning the objects. In addition, the application will also contain a database with basic information on the institutions from which the described sources originate.

The project is not finished yet, hopefully in 2013, but some of the work is already online. Click on the banner images to access the separate research areas.

Vocabulary: Hemd (female)

A couple of people have asked for this, so I thought I'd write a series on the basic garment vocabulary. Lets start with the skin out, shall we?

The most basic layer for a woman is the hemd, plural hemden. This word roughly translates to smock, shirt, chemise, and is the layer worn on the body next to the skin.  Of course, its not that simple, there were several types of hemd mentioned in the period inventories, and those are just the ones that were worth enough to note down in the records. (One of the problems with using clothing inventories is that only goods of value were written down in the inventories, as these were used to calculate the value of the estate for taxation purposes and to divide up the goods properly amoungst the heirs.) 

Other names mentioned in the inventories are:

• Frauenhemd (woman's hemd) 
• Unterhemd (under hemd) 
• Halshemd (neck hemd )
• Nachthemd (night hemd)

You notice that I don't translate the word hemd when I translated the descriptive terms, I want you to get used to thinking of these garments in the properly vocabulary terms, not the English equivilents.

Now what was the difference between a hemd, a frauenhemd and an unterhemd? We don't actually know, but we can make some good guesses based on depictions of hemd in artwork. 

The styles of hemd changed over time as the dress styles changed, and the style that would have been worn in the 1490's is probably not what was worn in the 1590's. I've collected a few images of hemd on my Pinterest board, you can see that there were a range of styles and shapes. Since each family made their own underwear, or had it made, each one would have been slightly different. We'll get into different cuts and styles later.