Eva Andersson

Eva Andersson, Kläderna och människan i medeltidens Sverige och Norge. Avhandlingar från Historiska institutionen i Göteborg 47 (Göteborg 2006) 284 pages. Written in Swedish with an English summary (Clothing and the individual in Mediaeval Sweden and Norway). ISBN 91-88614-60-3; ISSN 1100-6781
The manner of dress in Norway and Sweden between 1200 and 1500 is investigated in this dissertation. The main sources are Norwegian and Swedish charters, mainly wills. Clothes mentioned in them are analysed with the help of pictorial sources and preserved garments. As well as the particular garments, the complete dress and its development over time is studied. The clothing materials mentioned and changes over time are discussed. Comparison is also made with European fashion and manners of dress.
  Dress is also studied as an expression of social categories; how dress differed between the estates and between the sexes and how it was used to signal status and gender is examined. In this investigation the results from the first part of the dissertation is used, but also other sources, like sumptuary regulations and courtly literature.
  Previous research has seen the dress of the lower estates in Scandinavia as fixed and unaffected by contemporary fashion. In this dissertation it is shown that the spread of the fashionable ideal in dress reached far, both socially and geographically. The same types of garments were, to a large extent, worn by all levels of society, the difference lay in which materials they were made from.
  One of clothing’s most persistent functions is to express and signal differences between men and women. How this is done is, however, culture specific and changes over time. In the Middle Ages with few exceptions men and women wore the same types of garments. Primarily, gender was signalled with headgear and other items of clothing that did not emphasize the physical differences between the sexes. The question of how gender was signalled in clothing is in the dissertation tied to theories about how bodies and sex was perceived in the Middle Ages.
  As a result of this study we get a deeper understanding not only of the manner of dress, but also of how gender and status were perceived in mediaeval Norway and Sweden

"Eva Andersson, Kläderna och människan i medeltidens Sverige och Norge. Avhandlingar från Historiska institutionen i Göteborg 47 (Göteborg 2006) 284 pages. Written in Swedish with an English summary (Clothing and the individual in Mediaeval Sweden and Norway). ISBN 91-88614-60-3; ISSN 1100-6781 The manner of dress in Norway and Sweden between 1200 and 1500 is investigated in this dissertation. The main sources are Norwegian and Swedish charters, mainly wills. Clothes mentioned in them are analysed with the help of pictorial sources and preserved garments. As well as the particular garments, the complete dress and its development over time is studied. The clothing materials mentioned and changes over time are discussed. Comparison is also made with European fashion and manners of dress. Dress is also studied as an expression of social categories; how dress differed between the estates and between the sexes and how it was used to signal status and gender is examined. In this investigation the results from the first part of the dissertation is used, but also other sources, like sumptuary regulations and courtly literature. Previous research has seen the dress of the lower estates in Scandinavia as fixed and unaffected by contemporary fashion. In this dissertation it is shown that the spread of the fashionable ideal in dress reached far, both socially and geographically. The same types of garments were, to a large extent, worn by all levels of society, the difference lay in which materials they were made from. One of clothing’s most persistent functions is to express and signal differences between men and women. How this is done is, however, culture specific and changes over time. In the Middle Ages with few exceptions men and women wore the same types of garments. Primarily, gender was signalled with headgear and other items of clothing that did not emphasize the physical differences between the sexes. The question of how gender was signalled in clothing is in the dissertation tied to theories about how bodies and sex was perceived in the Middle Ages. As a result of this study we get a deeper understanding not only of the manner of dress, but also of how gender and status were perceived in mediaeval Norway and Sweden "

How Much Were They? The Prize of Male Servant Clothing in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century My aim in this article is to show how it is possible, by combining information from different kinds of evidence, mostly wills containing gifts of clothing to servants and archaeological evidence, to gain knowledge of how common working men were dressed in the Middle Ages. I compare several wills from the fourteenth century in which clothes were given to male servants and where both fabric width and price were stated, with the clothes of the so-called Bocksten Bog man. The most common material in clothes given to male servants during the first half of the fourteenth century was cloth from Brabant: Nivelles and Poperinge. In a large number of cases the material is not stated, which reduces the value of this information. Nevertheless, even this information is valuable when calculating the yardage and cost of those gifts, which usually consisted of a tunic and cloak. The prices of many of ...

Using probate inventories from 17th century Stockholm and Gothenburg, the two largest towns in Sweden, this paper discusses the value of the least valuable of garments: the worn out clothes and linen wear which, while described as “worn-out” or “totally worn-out, no value” still made it into the probate inventories. In this paper a survey of the clothing listed in around 400 bourgeois probate inventories from the seventeenth century is used to discuss the long-lasting value of clothes.
The inventories all originate in what can be described as the bourgeoisie in the widest possible sense: The social scale range from wealthy merchants to servants and day-labourers, with the majority of the people mentioned being artisans or small shopkeepers. Through these inventories we have access to social groups whose consumption is rarely studied, and especially not for this early period. The probates from Stockholm are a unique source, since the oldest are as early as from the late 16th century, while probate inventories from other larger towns only exist from c. 1650, and the law making them compulsory only came in 1734; the Gothenburg probates start in the 1660s.
An interesting find is that there is no exact correlation between the wealth of the inventory in general and whether worn-out clothes are listed or not. While there are more examples of worn out garments in probate inventories after the very poor you also find them in inventories which list silk suits and many items of gold jewellery. This shows something interesting about the value of textiles, and especially clothing: That even the worn out, or old-fashioned, retained some of its value and thus had to be included in a probate inventory. This paper presents a survey of the seemingly worthless: the old and worn-out, of cheap materials and of threadbare finery.

Gothenburg. Gothenburg was founded in 1621, with the specific purpose to be Sweden's port towards the west. The coast both north and south of Gothenburg belonged at this time to Denmark and the capital of Sweden was situated on the east coast, making trade a more expensive and cumbersome venture. In the paper an attempt to re-construct bourgeois manners of dress in Gothenburg is made and the various sources, their limitations and the challenges that they bring to the project are discussed.
  The sources to manners of dress in Gothenburg are fewer than for the capital, but probate inventories exist from the 1660s onwards and excavations has yielded finds of partially preserved  jackets, gloves,shoes and other items of clothing. There are a few garments preserved above ground and portraits and other visual sources are also found, though less common than from the Stockholm region.
  These sources are, however, not enough to get a complete picture of how people in the town dressed. Comparison can be made with other parts of Sweden and Scandinavia, but we can not assume that manners of dress were exactly the same in for instance Stockholm and Gothenburg. In my current research project I have seen that cotton clothing was more common among the burghers of Gothenburg than among the same class in Stockholm. This predates the foundation of the Swedish East India Company in Gothenburg, in 1731, and shows that the role of Sweden's gate to the West also had  concrete consequences in the lives of the town's burghers already in the 17th century. This shows the need for caution when using sources from other regions to fill out an incomplete picture, so that eventual differences are not obscured.

Clothing and perceptions of gender and body in the medieval an early modern period


Fashion and perceptions of gender and body are closely intertwined. Clothes are thus an important source to often unspoken ideas of masculinity and femininity. In the Middle Ages manners of dress were affected by an Aristotelian perception of gender, where the difference between men’s and women’s bodies was seen as a difference in degree rather than in kind. This led to fashions with similar garments for men and women, differing mainly in length, but not in cut. Gender was marked with smaller items of dress, such as headwear, which weren’t linked to physical differences between men and women, but instead to their social roles. In the late 15th century a change in how clothing was used to present men’s and women’s bodies occurred as the clothes now emphasized bodily difference, indicating a new way of thinking about gender and the body. According to historian Thomas Laqueur the break with the Aristotelian model occurred in the 18th century. This period saw a fundamental break in the development of masculine and feminine dress, but judging from the development of fashion it seems that there was another break, though less radical, in the perception of sex at the end of the Middle Ages.

Probates and divisions of inheritance are among the few sources available regarding clothing consumption in early modern Sweden. They are especially interesting because they show consumption in social strata which are usually absent in Swedish sources, such as artisans and soldiers. The probates thus cover a social spectrum from very rich burghers and nobility down to manual workers in workshops. While not all of the probates list clothing many do, and a variety of domestic and imported materials can be found. The probates also include both men and women, and while the material is too small for a quantitative study gender differences, both regarding the amount and value of the clothing and which materials and colours were worn by either sex, will be noted and discussed. Another source to the clothing consumption of the middle and lower classes in this period is the magistrate records of Stockholm. Both these will be used in this paper. The results from the survey will also be related to Swedish sumptuary laws of the 16th and 17th centuries. It is impossible to state if the sumptuary laws were adhered too, but a tentative conclusion on whether the forbidden luxury materials were in more widespread use or if the legislators were acting more on a perceived than an actual “problem”, may be drawn. This is especially valid for the sumptuary laws of 1664, where separate versions were issued for three of the four estates.