Hats and Veils - Caviness

Hats and Veils: There’s No Such Thing as
Freedom of Choice, and It’s a Good

Thing Too
Madeline H. Caviness
This essay will use some of the hats and veils worn (in representation) by medi-
eval men and women to challenge the modernist notion that socially mandated
dress codes infringe upon something called “freedom of expression” in modern
times. In a famous article, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a
Good Thing Too,” first published in 1992, Stanley Fish argued that if speech
could be free it would be meaningless, because all normal verbal interactions
have an impact that “costs” in some way.1 In a nutshell: “Free speech is just the
name we give to verbal behavior that serves the substantive agendas we wish
to advance.”2 I am suggesting that “dress” or “costuming” could be substituted
for “speech,” in the following citation: “The good news is that precisely because
speech is never “free” in the two senses required – free of consequences and free
from state pressure – speech always matters, is always doing work.”3 No matter
how “free” an individual member of civil society believes their costuming to
be, it has legal limits; it also has an impact on viewers, whether at cost or gain
to the wearer. What people wear matters because it has consequences. Dress
codes are signs that communicate group identity, and as such they are a part
of identity politics. Even when an individual submits “willingly” to wearing a
uniform as a condition of a wanted position, any such people – whether waiters,
nannies, nuns, hospital workers, hard-hat construction workers, police officers,
or military personnel – are donning a badge that connotes they do not own the
means of production; the particulars of their uniform were decided for them, and
wearing it is made a condition of employment. On the far end of the spectrum
are the people who have been involuntarily coerced into wearing an identifying
1
Stanley Fish, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech and It’s a Good Thing Too,”
Boston Review 17/1, no. 1 (Feb. 1992), pp. 3–4, 23–6. I am grateful to Laura Tillery,
Lora Webb, and Johanna Miller, who have helped me with the research and editing of this
paper, and Gabriel Quick who assisted with image permissions.
2
I cite the version reprinted as a chapter of a book: Stanley Eugene Fish, There’s No
Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too (New York, Oxford University Press,
1994), pp. 102–19, at p. 102.
3
Fish, There’s No Such Thing, pp. 104, 114.
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Edinburgh Library, on 03 Dec 2019 at 13:14:56, subject to the Cambridge Core
terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/51B1401F705CB83854FF4F6ED88AE864
74 MADELINE H. CAVINESS
sign, such as a prison uniform. This paper is about the contested areas in which
what appears from the outside to be coercion may be within the norms of social
negotiation and even individual choice.
A decade after Fish wrote this piece, “freedom” was trumpeted by the Bush
administration in the US as a justification for the American Oil Wars that are still
being fought in Iraq (Wars I and III) and Afghanistan (Wars II and IV).4 First
Lady Laura Bush and others tried to enlist the women’s movement to support
the war in order to save Afghan women from being veiled and secluded by the
Taliban.5 They seem to have missed the cognitive dissonance of advocating
freedom, in view of the fact that an army of men and women dressed strictly
according to military regulations, and presumably proud of their uniforms,
had been launched into another people’s homeland in the name of freedom of
expression. They also did not notice that Taliban men have to cover their uncut
hair with an elaborately wound turban. If Americans are not concerned about
personal freedom in matters of appearance in the battlefield, a powerful reason
is that recognition of friend and foe is a matter of life and death: dress codes
matter. Modern military forces are wearing updated versions of the knight’s
shield, crest, and coat of arms that identified him and his men in combat, when
their visors were down. Muslim women cover their hair with veils when they
go outside their home, much as medieval wives and widows did (the body-
covering burqa is admittedly more extreme). This is not to say that contempo-
rary Muslim culture is “medieval” and therefore backward, but that it is worth
examining medieval dress codes to find out how they worked, and to question
whether conformity was oppressive.6 The same questions are currently being
asked about Muslim veiling.
The issue of women veiling/veiling of women is proving extremely divi-
sive in some countries, east and west. For instance, since 2004 French govern-
ment restrictions prohibit Muslim girls from wearing the veil in public schools,
thereby inverting the free/unfree paradigm since those subjected to such controls
resist in the name of freedom, just as Fish predicted in such cases.7 It is in fact
4
I use the term Oils Wars in reference to the Opium Wars Britain launched on China
in 1839 and 1856. Oil is now the contested commodity: Since these wars are without end,
I list the dates of the US invasions: I. Iraq Gulf War, 1990; II. Afghanistan, 2001; III. Iraq,
2003; IV. Afghanistan, renewed deployment 2006.
5
Diane Sawyer had reported on the women of Afghanistan on “20/20” five years earlier,
and many western feminists including myself had joined in blogs and petitions because of the
reintroduction of the burqa, and the closing of girls’ schools.
6
I take note of the risk articulated by Kathleen Davis of seeming to enlist Medievalism
and Orientalism in a discussion of modern and medieval social identities: Kathleen Davis,
“Time behind the Veil: The Media, the Middle Ages, and Orientalism Now,” in The
Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2000),
pp. 105–22.
7
Following many published studies, a recent book brings together a number of studies
relating to this issue: Sieglinde Rosenberger and Birgit Sauer, Politics, Religion and Gender:
Framing and Regulating the Veil, Routledge Studies in Religion and Politics (Abingdon and
New York, Routledge, 2012). The New York Times has a topics section online: http://topics.
HATS AND VEILS: THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS FREEDOM OF CHOICE 75
a long-standing custom in French universities for students to ridicule anyone

wearing ethnic or religious head-coverings, often a form of racism exercised
in the name of laïcité (secularity); in the Sorbonne dining halls in 1960, I well
remember the table-thumping that always greeted a Sikh who wore the turban
that is mandatory in his culture.8 In 1936, the Reza Shah of Iran had also pro-
scribed the veil, with the ultimate result that its use was enforced by the Ayatollah
Khomeini in 1979.9 Regulations pro and con have not been regarded in the west
as equally threatening to freedom. The issue of women’s veiling has come to
the fore in all countries where Islamists or Islamophobes are advancing political
agendas.10 Many Muslim women have responded to the controversy by choosing
to wear the veil as a mark of personal freedom. This has stimulated the fashion
industry to provide colorful and attractive variations; social theorists might point
out that these women have merely succumbed to a different master, that of capi-
talist business. Playing both sides, the film industry and advertising have even
benefited from images of veiled women as erotic spectacle.11 Yet one has to credit
some women’s personal enjoyment of wearing a veil, and their appreciation of
the freedom it gives them to go unnoticed in public, and to be voyeurs.12
The longer historical view offered by the study of medieval Europe often
sheds light on our contemporary dilemmas and vice versa. Medieval culture was
thoroughly familiar with dress codes that were sometimes voiced in national
and local regulations: for instance, as described by Jane Burns, sumptuary laws
proscribed purple (what we might now call scarlet), and certain furs, to any but
royals and the highest ecclesiastical dignitaries.13 Among women, prostitutes
nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/muslim_veiling/index.html. As of July 2,
2014, the European Court of Human Rights upheld the French ban.
8
For the struggle over secularization in France, see: Rada Ivekovic, “The Veil in
France: Secularism, Nation, Women,” Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 11 (2004),
pp. 1117–19. A profound historical analysis is that of Joan Wallach Scott, The Politics of the
Veil (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2007).
9
Faegheh Shirazi, The Veil Unveiled: The Hijab in modern culture (Gainesville,
University Press of Florida, 2001), pp. 7, 88–109. For the history of attempts to ban the veil:
Stephanie Cronin, ed. Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism and
the Politics of Dress (Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2014).
10
Egypt and Turkey are current hot spots that can be followed on the internet; e.g., http://
www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/11/islamic-headscarves-turkey.html#
11
Shirazi, Veil Unveiled, pp. 10–87.
12
Reassessments of the veil based on these views are presented by Katherine Bullock,
Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical & Modern Stereotypes
(Herndon, VA, International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2002), and Sahar Amer, What Is
Veiling? (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), pp. 131–97.
13
For bibliography on sumptuary laws, see: E. Jane Burns, Courtly Love Undressed.
Reading through Clothes in Medieval French Culture (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2002), p. 246 n. 24; for thirteenth-century sumptuary laws, see: Sarah-Grace Heller,
“Limiting Yardage and Changes of Clothes: Sumptuary Legislation in Thirteenth-Century
France, Languedoc, and Italy,” in Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and
Other Cultural Imaginings, ed. E. Jane Burns (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004),
pp. 121–36.
Disclaimer:
Some images in the printed version of this book

are not available for inclusion in the eBook.
To view the image on this page please refer to

the printed version of the book.
Fig. 1. Prostitutes greeting the Prodigal Son, c. 1210, Chartres Cathedral
Notre-Dame, Window 35, panel 6 (after Deremble, Les vitraux narratifs, fig. 68,
by permission of the author).
were singled out for special control. At times, colorful garments were prescribed
and finery raised no objection, because this allowed them to be distinguished
from respectable women in the street;14 the ones who entertain the Prodigal Son
in an early thirteenth-century window in the north transept window of Chartres
Cathedral model long, tightly belted colorful chemises that reveal hourglass
figures. They also wear the latest fashion in the touret, a kind of pill-box hat
that covers the swept-back hair, and stays in place with a chin strap that leaves
the neck bare (fig. 1).15 Colette Manhes-Deremble notes that the veil was soon
after forbidden to prostitutes in France, but statutes in Arles had already pro-
scribed it in the twelfth century according to Sarah-Grace Heller, and in the
fourteenth-century statutes of London, Ruth Karras has found that by then the
reason given for forbidding finery to whores was to distinguish them from richly
adorned “good and noble ladies.”16 In the illustrated recension of the German
14
Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, trans. Caroline
Beamish (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 139–41.
15
Colette Manhes-Deremble, Les Vitraux narratifs de la cathédrale de Chartres: étude
iconographique, Corpus Vitrearum, France: Étude 2 (Paris, Léopard d’Or, 1993), pp. 162,
348, figs. 68 and 70, Window 35.
16
Heller, “Limiting Yardage,” p. 126; Ruth Mazo Karras, “‘Because the Other is a
DOGGETT 9781843844273 PRINT (M3816).indd 76 04/01/2016 10:07

Fig. 2. A woman of reduced legal capacity, and the rape of an itinerant woman
or the man’s lover, c. 1360: Sachsenspiegel III.47. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August
Bibliothek, Ms Cod. Guelf. 3.1 Aug. 2o, fol. 48r, register 5, detail (photo. HAB,
by permission).
law book known as The Mirror of Saxons (Sachsenspiegel), which dates from
about 1360, the concubine or vagrant minstrel being raped has long blonde hair
visible below her touret, and a tight-fitting red chemise, whereas a woman of
reduced legal capacity is demurely veiled (fig. 2).17 Despite the affirmation in
the law that rape of such low-class women is a punishable crime, the one being
attacked is dressed like a whore, raising doubts about her blamelessness, and
the perpetrator’s punishment is not represented. Mary Magdalene, in a window
in the west end of the nave of Chartres Cathedral, is dressed as a repentant
prostitute, in long chemise and loosely draped mantle, and a veil that completely
Poor Woman She Shall Be Called His Wench:’ Gender, Sexuality, and Social Status in Late
Medieval England,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, ed. Sharon Farmer and
Carol Braun Pasternack, Medieval Cultures (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press,
2003), pp. 214–15.
17
Sachsenspiegel III.47: Maria Dobozy, The Saxon Mirror: A Sachsenspiegel of the
Fourteenth Century (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp. 127, 232
n. 65, 66. For the middle German text and modern rendering see: Ruth Schmidt-Wiegand,
ed., Eike von Repgow: Sachsenspiegel. Die Wolfenbütteler Bilderhandschrift Cod. Guelf. 3.1
Aug. 2°, vol. 2: Textband (Berlin, Akademie Verlag,1993), pp. 246–7.

Disclaimer:
Some images in the printed version of this book

are not available for inclusion in the eBook.
To view the image on this page please refer to

the printed version of the book.
Fig. 3. Mary Magdalene recognizing Christ risen, c. 1210, Chartres Cathedral
Notre-Dame, Window 46, panel 12 (after Deremble Les vitraux narratifs, fig. 13,
by permission of the author).
covers her hair and neck (fig. 3).18 Monastic houses were often founded in her
name, to accommodate women who wanted to reform their lives.
Proscription is more common than prescription in medieval laws, which raises
the question to what extent the veils that identify women as wives, widows and
nuns, or any of the head-coverings worn by men to indicate their social station,
were mandatory. Crowns, coronets, the papal tiara, and mitres were conferred
in elaborate rituals, and although they were only worn on solemn occasions,
iconography requires that they are always visible in artistic representations; the
three Kings, for instance, usually sleep and ride in their crowns (fig. 4).19 In
Manhes-Deremble, Vitraux narratifs, pp. 42–5, 368–9, Window 46.

18
19
Madeline H. Caviness, The Windows of Christ Church Cathedral, Canterbury, Corpus
Vitrearum Medii Aevi, Great Britain II (London, Oxford University Press for the British
Academy, 1981), p. 90, figs. 149–50.

Fig. 4. The Three Kings (Magi) journeying, c. 1180, Canterbury, Christ Church
Cathedral, north choir aisle window n.XV, panel 38 (after Caviness, Windows,
fig. 149).
the Sachsenspiegel, the hierarchical authority of the local secular courts was
maintained by the hats worn by the highest officials, but in the king’s court “no
Schöffen or judge may wear a cap, hat, cowl, hood, or gloves.”20 The hats worn
by Jewish men in the middle ages were self-regulated, though many scholars
wrongly believe these were required as a result of the Lateran Council of 1215.21
Representations of Jewish men in tall hats go back to late antiquity, and are
common by the twelfth century.22 In kingdoms where regulations were issued in
accordance with the Council’s call for a mark of difference, the stipulated signs to
20
Sachsenspiegel III.69: Dobozy, The Saxon Mirror, p. 134; Schmidt- Wiegand, ed.,
Wolfenbütteler Textband, pp. 270–71. The Schöffen held hereditary appointments to the court
with a function approximating our jurors.
21
This argument is presented fully in my forthcoming book Women and Jews in the
Sachsenspiegel Picture Books (Turnout, Brepols, forthcoming), Chapter 5.
22
Strauss, Raphael. “The ‘Jewish Hat’ as an Aspect of Social History,” Jewish Social
Studies 4 (1942), pp. 59–72. Many early medieval representations of Jews with hats are
Fig. 5. Seal of the Jews in Augsburg with the Imperial eagle, a Jewish hat, and
inscriptions in Hebrew and Latin, 1298; plaster cast in the Hohenlohe-Waldenburg
Schlossmuseum from the original in Augsburg, Stadtische Archiv (after Friedenberg,
Medieval Jewish Seals, 1987, entry 79 p. 171, by permission of the publisher).
be sewn on outer garments were a yellow bezant (roundel) or bands resembling

Moses’ tablets; the German Emperors did not issue directives, despite remind-
ers from the pope. In Germany, Jewish communities chose to represent funnel-
shaped hats on their seals, coins, and tombs; the seal of the Jewish merchants
of Augsburg even had the imperial eagle surmounted by a Jewish hat instead
of a crown, identifying them proudly as the Emperor’s people (Kammerknecht)
(fig. 5).23 A Rhenish Synod of 1200–1220 declared that men should not shave
in the manner of Christians, so beards, already customary in representation,
r eproduced in Heinz Schreckenberg, The Jews in Christian Art: An Illustrated History, trans.
John Bowden (New York, Continuum, 1996).
23
The best source for this material is Daniel M. Friedenberg, Medieval Jewish Seals
from Europe (Detroit, MI, Wayne State University Press, 1987); for the Augsburg seal illus-
trated here see pp. 171–2. For the cast: Friedrich Karl Fürst zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg,
became another Jewish marker regulated by their own community leaders. This
does not, of course, remove the lack of parity between the Christian majority
and the Jewish minority, but it underlines the fact that the religious leaders
of both groups saw the advantages of ready recognition in public, since they
forbade mixed marriages. And easy identification for Jewish men was supposed
to protect them from armed attack in the street, under the Imperial Peace.
It remains puzzling that Jewish women, though also required by the Council
to wear a mark of difference in their clothing, seem to have followed the same
fashions in veils as their Christian counterparts throughout the middle ages.24 In
1415 papal legislation called for a circular mark of difference to be worn on the
front of the veil, but I have found none in representations.25 Only in the sixteenth
century, when a few German cities required Jewish men to wear their custom-
ary hats in the street, do we find images of women wearing the same funnel-
shaped hat over their veils (fig. 6). The habitual lack of distinction could have
given rise to confusion in the street, just as it can for art historians deciphering
iconography. For instance, the Washington Haggadah, which was written and
illuminated by Joel Ben Simeon in Germany in 1498, has an unusual depiction
of Elijah (or the Messiah) approaching a magnificent house on a donkey (fig. 7).
A well-dressed man, in a red chaperon, rides on the rump of the donkey with
a boy, and a woman, in a tall hennin, and a girl are astride the tail, while an
old woman holds onto its end. According to a tale that was elaborated in the
fifteenth century, the Jews would ride on the Messiah’s ass and the Christians
on its tail, so that when he guided it into the sea all the gentile persecutors
would drown.26 The elegant lady is identified as Jewish by the glass of Passover
wine she holds, despite her position on the tail. It seems that wealthy Jews of
both sexes might overstep (in fantasy, if not in fact) the sumptuary regulations
formulated by their own leaders as well as by town fathers.27
The matter of veiling is complex. Veiling and unveiling are long-standing
metaphors for covering up and revealing the truth, and they resonate throughout
western philosophy, literature, and even optics.28 What is veiled may be held in
suspicion.29 Yet the multivalent resonances of the veil include opposite values;
Sphragistische Aphorismen; 300 Mittelalterliche Siegel, systematisch classificirt und erläutert

(Heilbronn: Schell, 1882, and Google e-Book), p. 99 no. 272, Pl. XXXIV.
24
I have examined Old Testament images in Christian art as well as images in Jewish
manuscripts, and in Schreckenberg, Jews in Christian Art.
25
Piponnier and Mane, Dress in the Middle Ages, p. 137; the authors also claim that
married Jewish women wore two blue bands on their veils, but I have not seen depictions.
26
Katrin Kogman-Appel in David Stern and Katrin Kogman-Appel, eds., The Washington
Haggadah Copied and Illustrated by Joel ben Simeon (Cambridge, MA, and Washington, DC,
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press and The Library of Congress, 2011), pp. 80–82.
27
Kogman-Appel in Stern, Washington Haggadah, p. 103.
28
Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval
Allegory (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2004).
29
An attitude that was very clear in the French debate: Scott, Politics of the Veil,
pp. 132–4.
Fig. 6a. Men and women wearing Jewish hats (the celebration of Passover),
c. 1390, Wenzel Bible, Bavaria, Vienna Österreischische Nationalbibliothek,
Cod. 2759–2764, vol. III, f. 112v. (photo. ONB, by permission).
Fig. 6b. Man and woman in “Jewish hats” paying Judas, 1399, Peter Comestor,
Historia evangelica. Freiburg in Breisgau. Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek,
Cod. Tennenbach 8, fol. 75r (photo. BLB, by permission).
the veil proves to be an unstable signifier – as unstable as “women” them-

selves were held to be by the Christian clergy.30 The mature woman’s veil in the
middle ages was supposed to be a demonstration of her modesty and honesty,
but young girls before they were married – presumably innocent virgins – wore
their long hair uncovered, as seen in the Sachsenspiegel when a married and
an unmarried sister divide their inheritance (fig. 8). By an odd twist of theol-
ogy, Christianity adopted the ancient custom of assiduously covering up most
women’s hair with cloth veils even though Saint Paul saw a woman’s long hair
as her glory, since it can serve as a veil to cover her body: “nec ipsa natura
docet vos quod vir quidem si comam nutria ignominia est illi; mulier vero si
30
A perusal of a collection of medieval texts on women will confirm this: Alcuin
Blamires, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992).
Fig. 7. Jewish men and women riding on Elijah’s ass into Jerusalem, 1478,
Joel ben Simeon, Washington Haggadah. Library of Congress Hebr. Ms. 1, f. 19v.
(photo. Courtesy of the Hebraic Division of the Library of Congress).
comam nutria Gloria est illi quoniam capilli pro velamine ei dati sunt.” [“Doth
not even nature itself teach you, that a man indeed, if he nourish his hair, it is
a shame unto him? But if a woman nourish her hair, it is a glory to her; for her
hair is given to her for a covering.” I Corinthians 11:14–15.] Yet for nuns, the
veil was a substitute for shaven hair, which might have seemed against nature.31
Images of Saints Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, and Agnes demonstrate the
possibility of hair serving as a veil to cover a woman’s breasts and even her
sex; an early fourteenth-century statue at Écouis (Normandy) has floor-length
hair that covers her back completely and all but her face and neck in front
(fig. 9).32 Late medieval images often showed Mary Magdalene with hair all
31
Désirée Koslin, “The Robe of Simplicity: Initiation, Robing, and Veiling of Nuns in
the Middle Ages,” in Robes of Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture, ed. Stewart Gordon
(New York, Palgrave, 2001), p. 257.
32
Dorothy Gillerman, Enguerran de Marigny and the Church of Notre-Dame at Ecouis:
Art and Patronage in the Reign of Philip the Fair (University Park, Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1994), pp. 106, 109–10, 188–9, fig. 45; Danielle Gaborit-Chopin et al.,
eds., L’art au temps des rois maudits, Philippe le Bel et ses fils, 1285–1328 (Paris, Réunion
des Musées Nationaux,1998), pp. 106–7.
Fig. 8. Married and unmarried daughters dividing their inheritance, c. 1360,
Sachsenspiegel I.3. Wolfenbüttel, fol. 11v reg 5, detail (photo. HAB, by permission).
over her body, sometimes leaving her breasts bare (fig. 10). In the early six-
teenth century a German author known as Henricus Cornelius Agrippa praised
women for growing their hair to cover “the more shameful parts,” while noting
that another of their blessings is that those do not protrude as men’s do.33
In the eleventh century, the Pauline proscriptions were taken up by reforming
churchmen such as Saint Ivo of Chartres. In his Panormia, a guide to correct
behavior in marriage written in the 1090s, Ivo admonished men not to wear
their hair long like a veil because “natural order” dictated that women should be
veiled; women are not the glory or image of God, so men must rule over them,
and long hair in men would be a sign that they had given up this natural right.
It is notable that Ivo has transposed Saint Paul’s “glory,” from women’s hair to
the statement that women were not created in the glory of God.34
It begins to sound as though veiling was imposed on women by men as a
heavily freighted symbol of their subjugation in a “natural” order ordained
by God. However when women questioned the need to wear a veil, they
were not rebelling against the socio-religious order. Veiling was a subject for
negotiation between nuns and their male mentors or peers, or at least I know
of three such recorded exchanges. The first is between Heloise and Abelard,
when she asked him to justify the existence of nuns, and begged him for a
33
Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the
Female Sex, trans. Albert Rabil (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago, 1996), pp. 54–6.
34
Ivo Carrnotensis, Panormia, in Patrologia Latina online, vol. 161, Cap. 95: “mulier
autem idea velat, quia non est Gloria, aut imago Dei;” see also Cap. 92, “Quare mulier debeat
velare caput suum.”
Fig. 9. Statue of Mary of Egypt or Mary Magdalen, 1311–1313, stone with traces
of polychromy, Church of Notre-Dame, Écouis (Normandy), 147 x 50.6 x 34cm
(photo: Jean-Gilles Berizzi licensed by Art Resource).
Fig. 10. Hartmann Schedel, Mary Magdalen lifted up by angels, 1493, woodblock
print, Nuremberg, printed Anton Koberger, Nuremberg Chronicle (Liber
Chronicarum), Cambridge University Library, Peterborough.U.5.17, fol. 108r
(photo: Cambridge Digital Library, Inc.0.A.7.2[888], by permission).
rule and habit better suited to women than the standard Benedictine cowl and
wool tunic of their order.35 Abelard replied with examples of many famous
women, biblical and saintly, who might inspire her. One is Saint Agatha, who
“saved the heathen from the fires of Etna by means of her veil, a miracle
which no man’s cowl has ever achieved.”36 In the Third Letter of Direction,
his justification of the habit begins with the reasons not to wear fine clothes;
essentially that costly clothing makes the owner too careful and mindful of
material things, and is less warm.37 He then justifies the choice of fabrics
before expanding on the veil: black clothes are fitting for penitents, and lamb’s
wool for virginal brides of Christ. Veils are to be made of dyed linen, not silk,
of two sorts: those for virgins already consecrated by the bishop have the sign
of the Cross stitched in white on the forehead, signifying the “integrity of
their virginity”; this will also prevent lascivious gazes. The veils of those not
consecrated shall not bear this mark.38 Apparently the distinction was main-
tained after death; consecrated nuns were buried with their veils.39 An embroi-
dered cross occasionally appears on the Virgin Mary’s veil in the late twelfth
century, as in the central east widow of the Cathedral of Poitiers, and in the
crucifixion window formerly in the Berlin Schlossmuseum that was attributed
to Gerlachus.40 The small Greek cross is painted in black on the blue or white
veil (fig. 11).
In the early thirteenth century, the Dominican author of the Ancrene Wisse
was more lenient than Abelard, especially when it came to thick underwear and
the wimple or gorget that is worn under the veil and completely envelops the
chin and neck (fig. 12).41 Writing for three anchorites somewhere in the west
country of England, he emphasizes that there are no fixed rules because they
are already hidden from men: Saint Paul’s injunction to cover their heads is the
35
Betty Radice, ed., The Letters of Abelard and Heloise (Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1974), p. 160.
36
Radice, ed., The Letters, p. 181, letter 6.
37
Radice, ed., The Letters, p. 250, letter 7.
38
Abelard continues that all nuns should wear clean undergarments next to their skin
and always sleep in them (his answer to her plea not to have to keep wool drawers on at all
times, because of menstruation).
39
Koslin, “Robe of Simplicity,” pp. 256–7; she also explains the differences between the
conventual and enclosed sisters.
40
Marcel Aubert et al., Le Vitrail français (Paris, Éditions des Deux Mondes, 1958),
Pl. I. The German window was destroyed in 1945: Hermann Schmitz, Die Glasgemälde des
Königlichen kunstgewerbe-museums zu Berlin, vol. II (Berlin, Julius Bard, 1913), p. 3, Pl. 1;
H. Wentzel, Meisterwerke der Glasmalerei, 2nd enlarged edn. (Berlin, Deutscher Verein für
Kunstwissenschaft, 1954), pp. 19, 85, Pl. 21; for the cross, see Robert Grinnell, “Iconography
and Philosophy in the Crucifixion Window at Poitiers,” Art Bulletin 28, no. 3 (1946), pp. 172,
178 n. 27.
41
Hugh White, ed., Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses (London and New York,
Penguin Books, 1993), pp. xix–xx, 193–96; James Morton, ed., The Ancren Riwle: A Treatise
on the Rules and Duties of Monastic Life (New York, AMS Press, 1968), pp. 418–21, with
the middle English text.
Fig. 11. Gerlachus, the Virgin Mary at the Crucifixion (detail), c. 1170–1180,
stained glass window from Ulm, formerly in the Berlin Schlossmuseum, destroyed
in 1945 (after Schmitz, Die Glasgemälde, vol. II, Pl. 1).
Fig. 12. St Brigitta with nuns habited in black with white wimples, initial letter
“O Ihesu Christe eternal” from the Fifteen prayers of St. Bridget, first half of the
fifteenth century, The Burnet Psalter (University of Aberdeen, MS 25, fol.61r,
detail) (Courtesy of the UA).
only biblical prescription, so they should wear warm caps (but not of silk) and
black or white veils over them; they must cover their shame, but “not turn the
covering into adornment and finery;” their hair should be cropped, or shaved if
they prefer. He urges them to be comfortable because their inner spiritual state
is more important than their outer regime. A very different exchange from those
of Heloise and Abelard, or the anchorites and their confessor, occurred between
two women heads of houses, a reformed canoness and a Benedictine Magistra.
Close to the height of her productivity and influence, about 1150, Hildegard of
Bingen received a letter from Magistra Tengswich (Tenxwind) of Andernach,
asking about “strange and irregular practices” at Disibodenberg.42 In a deeply
ironic tone, Tengswich appears to be incredulous of reports that her nuns wore
diadems and long white silk veils on high feast days, and were accustomed
to sing the psalms with their hair loose. Hildegard’s reply was eloquent and
uncompromising:
O, woman, what a splendid being you are! For you have set your foundation
in the sun, and have conquered the world. . . . a woman once married, ought
not to indulge herself in prideful adornment of hair or person, nor ought she
to lift herself up to vanity, wearing a crown and other golden ornaments . . .
But these strictures do not apply to a virgin, for she stands in the unsullied
purity of paradise, lovely and unwithering, and she always remains in the
full vitality of the budding rod. A virgin is not commanded to cover up her
hair.43
Hildegard also replied with images: In the Luca manuscript of her Liber
Divinorum Operum, Vision III, three female figures, personifying Love,
Humility, and Peace, wear diadems over their long loose hair, and two are in
white silk chemises, none of which is specified in the text (fig. 13).44 I assume
that these figures, particularly since they included Humility, were drawn by
Hildegard to reassert her view of the appropriateness of such rich attire.45 Their
secular appearance also recalls that of the virgins in the bosom of Ecclesia in
42
Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, vol. 2
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 127–8, Letter 52. Alfred Haverkamp,
“Tenxwind von Andernach und Hildegard von Bingen: Zwei ‘Weltanschauungen’ in der Mitte
des 12. Jahrhunderts,” in Institutionen, Kultur und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Festschrift
für Josef Fleckenstein zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, ed. Lutz Fenske et al. (Sigmaringen,
J. Thorbecke, 1984), p. 521, revealed that Tenxwind was a sister of Richard, abbot of the
reformed college of canons at Springiersbach.
43
Baird and Ehrman, Letters of Hildegard, pp. 128–9, Letter 52r.
44
Albert Derolez and Peter Dronke, eds., Hildegardis Bingensis Liber Divinorum
Operum, Corpus Christianorum continuatio mediaevalis, 92 (Turnhout, Brepols, 1996),
pp. 379–85.
45
Madeline H. Caviness, “Hildegard as Designer of the Illustrations to her Works,”
in Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of her Thought and Art, ed. Charles Burnett and
Peter Dronke, Warburg Institute Colloquia, Vol. 4 (London, The Warburg Institute, 1998),
pp. 35–42; reprinted in Madeline H. Caviness, Art in the Medieval West and its Audience
(Aldershot, Ashgate, 2001), Chapter VIII.
Fig. 13. Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Divinorum Operum, c. 1225, Lucca,

Biblioteca Statale, Ms. 1942, fol. 132r. (photo. Su concessione del Ministro dei
Beni e le Attività culturali e del Turismo).
Fig. 14. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, c. 1175, formerly Wiesbaden Ms 1

(missing), fol. 66r (photo. Rhenisches Bidarchiv, Cologne, by permission).
the lost Wiesbaden Scivias, Book II vision 5, where the central figure wears a
red gown (fig. 14).46
Hildegard returned to the Pauline notion of a woman’s long hair as her glory,
a gift from God. The sensuality of clinging silk chemise and veil or garlanded
golden hair is intended for their spiritual bridegroom, for Christ’s eyes alone.
She is careful to describe them only as things ordinary married women should
not indulge in, yet the manuscript painting reveals uncensored sensuality, the
fulfillment of Hildegard and her nuns’ desire, albeit in a visionary realm where
they contrast with the Benedictine habit worn by the Magistra/author/voyeur
who records the scene (fig. 13). A distant echo is found in the thirteenth-century
lyric of a Provençal trobairitz that Jane Burns uses to great effect in arguing
for the significance of clothing in “courtly Romance” as an expression of
women’s desire; in sirventesca the female poet laments the restrictions placed
on women of her class by the sumptuary laws, which have caused them “harm
and dishonour,” and urges others to reject the wimple and veil in favour of
“garlands of flowers in the summer for love.”47 The medieval linen wimple was
likely hot and restricting, as some of our contemporaries in convents would
46
Adelgundis Führkötter and Angela Carlevaris, eds., Hildegardis Bingensis Scivias,
Corpus Christianorum continuatio mediaevalis, 43 (Turnhout, Brepols, 1978), pp. 180–81.
47
Burns, Courtly Love, pp. 60, 75–7. The poem, Bruckner no. 29, is by P. Basc, who is
assumed to be female.
Fig. 15. The Virgin/Ecclesia trampling Satan and Judith slaying Holofernes, late
thirteenth-century, Speculum humanae salvationis, Kremsmünster Benedictine
Abbey, Codex Cremifanensis 243, fol. 35v (detail). (photo. Courtesy of
Stistsbibliothek, Kremünster).
know from experience, so it is not surprising that medieval nuns complained

about it. Yet the protests of Hildegard and the trobairitz were not just against
discomfort; they stand out for their expressed desire to allow women to con-
struct themselves as glorious apparitions. In the mute world of secular art we
can get many glimpses of women’s “bodies forged from cloth,” notably in the
increasingly elaborate head-dresses worn by high-born matrons as well as the
layers of embroidered gowns and lined mantles; the hennin worn in the fifteenth
century has already been noticed (see fig. 7). Few nuns or canonesses seem to
have aspired to follow these fashions, but the winged cornette head-dress of
the nuns of Saint Vincent de Paul, worn until recently, is a vestige of extreme
fashion left over from the early seventeenth century, when wealthy women
enlisted to found the Daughters of Charity.
The nun’s veil is probably over-exaggerated as a mark of difference in the
high middle ages, since married women and widows ubiquitously wore similar
veils as brides of Christ or as brides of laymen.48 This changed in the age of
fashion, with ever fuller and more exaggerated veils being designed by or for
laywomen. Artists used their abundance of silk to indicate the vigorous move-
ments of the wearers, as when Judith severs Holofernes’ head (fig. 15, right).
Veils provided a new “semantic versatility” for draftsmen to exploit in the inter-
ests of narrative.49 Yet these subjects also convey the negative view held by
male adjudicators of female attire; the Virgin and saints are more demure – even
Margaret as she conquers the dragon (fig. 15, left). In the late middle ages
a proliferation of sumptuary laws in German towns addressed the shape and
48
As observed by Koslin, “Robe of Simplicity,” p. 265.
49
Shirazi, Veil Unveiled, p. 7.
Fig. 16. Gosswin van der Weyden, “Gift of Kalmthout,” 1511, Oil on oak panel,
153 x 153 cm. Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemäldegalerie. (photo: Jörg P. Anders,
licensed by Art Resource).
fabric of most kinds of headgear, and limited their decoration.50 Nonetheless the
head-dress continued to expand sideways or upwards, becoming a pre-modern
hat that frames the forehead and chin, the neck, and the shoulders (fig. 16).
Like much high fashion, it also restricts movement, announcing that this is a
lady who does not do a servant’s work in her household. I well remember the
huge hats with ribbons and flowers and veils that we wore in England into the
1960s; women greeting each other at the Ascot horse races, or the Prize Day as
a boys’ public school, could not lean toward each other as they shook hands.51
They willingly colluded with conspicuous consumption, though they might not
have liked the label.
This essay has been written with the politicisation of the Muslim women’s
body as a backdrop. As noted at the outset, non-Muslims have been quick to
regard veiling as an imposition on women, abrogating their freedom of choice.
50
Liselotte Constanze Eisenbart, Kleiderordnungen der deutschen Städte zwischen 1350
und 1700: ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Bürgertums, Göttinger Bausteine
zur Geschichtswissenschaft, 32 (Göttingen, Musterschmidt, 1962), pp. 149–59.
51
These summer events involved constant changes of hats. My grandmother’s generation
had a formula that the hat worn to the first day at the Henley boat races would do for the
second day at Ascot horse races.
And when it has been mistaken as a religious rather than a cultural sign, banning
the veil has a serious cost – as in France, where many girls stopped going to
school. When Muslim women found a voice, they protested that they chose the
veil freely (for personal reasons), yet it had become political – neither free from
consequences nor free from state pressure. Christian and Jewish women have
been spared such extreme contention. By the early 1960s, when the Catholic
Church abolished mandated dress codes for their religious, the veil was isolating
nuns from the general population, so they were “freed” from it, even though in
entering their order they had willingly submitted to wearing it.52 In that they no
longer wear a uniform they no longer signal their vowed service to the Church,
and they are free to dress as they wish – unless, of course, they prefer the tra-
ditional habit. Each time a dress code is imposed, abandoned, or changed it is
worth asking whose agenda it advances, and whether it was negotiated by the
wearers.
Prior to the modern era, social agreements about public dress appear to have
created a coherent set of visual signs that all could decipher, and these were
never abrogated by individual “freedom of choice;” that issue would not have
arisen.53 We have seen that even Hildegard and the trobairitz vociferated on
behalf of groups of women. Conformity in public places quietly served identity
politics, without placing women at the centre of economic, religious, and ethnic
power struggles. Long before Stanley Fish, there seems to have been an under-
standing that the way people dress has social and political consequences, so it
is better negotiated than forced on one group by another.
As noted by Koslin, “Robe of Simplicity,” p. 255.

52
Even Joan of Arc claimed to be motivated by her will to serve God, not by a personal
53
desire to cross-dress.

Hats and Veils - Caviness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

Hats and Veils - Caviness

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hats and Veils - Caviness

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hats and Veils: There’s No Such Thing as

Freedom of Choice, and It’s a Good

a ­long-­standing custom in French universities for students to ridicule anyone

Some images in the printed version of this book

To view the image on this page please refer to

DOGGETT 9781843844273 PRINT (M3816).indd 76 04/01/2016 10:07

DOGGETT 9781843844273 PRINT (M3816).indd 77 04/01/2016 10:07

Some images in the printed version of this book

To view the image on this page please refer to

Manhes-­Deremble, Vitraux narratifs, pp. 42–5, 368–9, Window 46.

DOGGETT 9781843844273 PRINT (M3816).indd 78 04/01/2016 10:07

be sewn on outer garments were a yellow bezant (roundel) or bands resembling

Sphragistische Aphorismen; 300 Mittelalterliche Siegel, systematisch classificirt und ­erläutert

the veil proves to be an unstable signifier – as unstable as “women” them-

Fig. 13. Hildegard of Bingen, Liber Divinorum Operum, c. 1225, Lucca,

Fig. 14. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, c. 1175, formerly Wiesbaden Ms 1

know from experience, so it is not surprising that medieval nuns complained

As noted by Koslin, “Robe of Simplicity,” p. 255.

You might also like

a long-standing custom in French universities for students to ridicule anyone

Manhes-Deremble, Vitraux narratifs, pp. 42–5, 368–9, Window 46.

Sphragistische Aphorismen; 300 Mittelalterliche Siegel, systematisch classificirt und erläutert