On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, otsisto wrote: > Someone told me that sideless surcoats were only worn by royalty, yet > I found a picture for a French manuscript by Guilaume de Machault that > shows a lady in waiting in what appears to be a "brocade" sidless. So > is the Royal only w/sideless a myth or....????
What you heard was an oversimplification -- true in part, but not the entire story. It sounds like you were hearing from someone who had attended one of my lectures, or maybe heard from someone who did, since the usual assumption is that surcoats were worn by lots and lots of women of many classes for most of two centuries -- and that is the myth. >From what I can tell from my research, there was a progression both in the styles of surcotes and the people who wore them. Put very briefly, the surcote with scooped-in sides (note this is distinct from surcotes with side slits, which are earlier and another issue entirely) moves from being depicted on noblewomen and higher (roughly 1340-1380) to being depicted primarily, and eventually only, on royal women and members of the royal family (by around 1400). During this shift the style acquires more and more fur, as the fur lining creeps out to become an edging, and then a full front fur piece, and also a fur hem band that becomes wider over time. The fur is invariably white; in the earlier versions this is most likely meant to signify pured miniver (an expensive fur popular in the mid-14th c. among the higher nobility), and later, more likely ermine -- a fur almost exclusively restricted to royalty. As the 15th century continues, depictions of the surcote on royal women narrow in circumstance, eventually appearing virtually always in ceremonial circumstances (weddings, coronations) or highly symbolic contexts. At the same time, artists use it more and more as a symbol for royalty and, over time, for "old" royalty, particularly royal saints, as well as for certain allegorical figures that have "queenly" or "saintly" qualities and associations. By around 1475, it no longer appears on real, living queens, but continues to be used in artwork for some time, and in more unusual shapes and designs. The lines of the cut-in sides also get adopted and combined into artistic renditions of gowns on allegorical, historical, and fantasy figures in certain contexts. Those later, often fantastical versions of the surcote style almost certainly never existed in life. There are some exceptions to this timeline, which I go into in my lecture on this topic. Funerary sculpture (including brasses) fits into a category of symbolic usage -- this requires a long explanation that I cannot go into now. There's a brief appearance, in Franco-Flemish art at least, of surcotes on brides around 1450, but it is uncertain whether this occurred in real life. Now, back to the image you asked about. The Machaut manuscripts include several women in surcotes. They are all on the early end of this timeline, around 1350, and are among the evidence for the surcote being worn by French noblewomen in this period. I use several of them in my lecture, in fact. I would guess you are talking about the one in Le Remede de Fortune (Paris, Bib. Nat. MS Fr. 1586), fol. 55 -- the banquet scene. Note, though, that this is the earlier version of the surcote; it has a fur edging at the opening, but it has not yet acquired the front "placket" or "plastron" of fur and the jeweled decorations down the center front that characterize the later style that appears to have been worn only by royal women. Does this help? --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
