I’ve been looking at two paintings, both called “The Interior of a Gothic Church Looking East”:
One painting, dated 1615, attributed to Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder
The other painting, dated 1604-1615, also attributed to Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger and Jan Brueghel the Elder
Both paintings depict a moment in unknown (possibly fictional) churches. In both painting, many - but not all - of the women are wearing what appears to be a black hat topped with a spike or point over a black ankle-length veil or train.
What is this garment? The shape of the hat reminds me of the medieval Jewish hat, but the color is wrong. Some of the women are accompanied by children, and the women’s dresses are not uniform, so I assume it’s not part of a nun’s habit. Is this just what women (of a certain class, anyway) of the day wore to cover their heads in church? If that’s the case, does this kind of chapel veil have a name?
The description of each painting identifies the group of women entering from the right as a christening party. The woman at the head of the procession is *not *wearing one of these interesting outfits.
I’ve honestly never seen that shape of hat before, but here’s a Pinterest boardthat has more examples…it’s called a “pot lid” hat there, but that’s just for identification purposes.
Going by the Pinterest board that MrDibble linked, it looks like the veil (I think English people from the period would probably have called it a mantle, since that’s what similar items from QEI’s wardrobe accounts are called) is called a huik. Here’s another Pinterest board if you really want to look at more pictures.
Googling “huik 17th century holland” has turned up this glossary of Dutch Renaissance costuming terms, which says a huik is a “Cloak or cape of heavy material thrown over head or worn around the shoulders”. Oh, look, there’s an entire blog post about them, with a link to a PDF of more research.
No luck on the hat part, though. That kind of leads me to believe that Dutch people would probably call it . . . a hat. Or that there are lots of different terms in extant writing which could be this hat, but nobody can really say what term refers to the pot-lid hat for certain, so they use a modern term for it instead of a period one. Kind of like hennins in the 15th century. You know, pointy princess hat, also comes in truncated versions? Here’s the thing: No one actually knows for certain if medieval people are referring to princess pointy hats when they use hennin, and it’s not used in English sources at all, but modern people use it to describe the style because everyone knows what they’re talking about when they do, and it’s an improvement over princess pointy hat.
The second Pinterest board I linked actually includes a pin of this image of Spanish women on their chopines. Note the similarity to the Flemish women of the central figure? In 16th-century Spanish, the veil is called a manto (mantle) and the hat is called a sombrero (a “shade” hat [from la sombra (shadow/shade)). I don’t want to say there’s a direct connection between the huik and the manto, because mantles like this are incredibly common throughout Europe in the 16th and early 17th centuries, but that’s what the two parts to the ensemble would be called in Spanish, if that’s at all useful to you.
And, yes, the huge tassel on the top of the woman’s sombrero is a really common feature of the hats in the early 16th century in Spain.
Yeah, that’s true, but I’m reluctant to point a finger and say that it’s all Spain’s fault because mantles and veils are so widespread throughout western Europe for a long time before Spain takes control of The Netherlands. The other problem is that common people’s clothing doesn’t really get documented very well until about the 16th century, and it starts with Flemish artists, so a huik or its predecessors could have been common women’s wear and nobody bothered to document it until market scenes became popular objects for art. (I’m actually not sure if I support this argument of my own, since the huik seem to contrast pretty sharply with the Gothic silhouette of the 15th century, but the scarcity of non-allegorical images of common people prior to the 16th century does make it difficult to document clothing for anybody but the nobility.)
For anyone who doesn’t know, the Spanish crown actually takes control of The Netherlands in 1506 through inheriting it from the Habsburgs. The Dutch really weren’t very happy about this, because Spain saw them as a new and valuable source of tax money and Spain was an indifferent ruler there, so it turned into the 80 Years’ War.
Thanks very much. MrDibble’s link started me on a search that ultimately led to the PDF that Miss Purl McKnittington mentions. That paper includes a contemporary account that suggests that the round cap with tassel and veil was a regional variation on the more common “duck-billed” huik, although some of the paintings on the two Pinterest boards show both kinds being worn in the same place and time. Perhaps one style was replacing the other, or one was considered fancier. Several scenes include both women wearing a huik and women wearing other headcoverings (coifs, folded/draped linen) so the huik evidently was not universal. I wonder if this reflects the wearer’s religious conservatism or simply the (im)practicality of the huik for women who engaged in significant physical labor throughout the day?
In the Low Countries at the time there were non-vowed religious communities of women who were either unmarried or widowed and who lived in community and wore a distinctive habit. They declined sharply from the sixteenth century onwards, but in fact a few communities survived into the twentieth century, in both Belgium and the Netherlands. Such a woman was known as a begijn, and the institution in which she lived as a begijnhof. The begijnhof in Amsterdam is no longer used as such, but it still exists as is a notable landmark.
It would have been unusual for a begijn to have children, but she might very well do work involving caring for or educating children.
I don’t know whether the women in the paintings are begijns, but it’s certainly possible.
Only in the same way that a penguin and a dude in a tuxedo are wearing the same outfit.
More seriously, modest dress for women is something both widows and nuns adopted early on in history, because both are supposed to be very modest and circumspect. This means there are some similarities between the ways both groups of women dress, but I don’t know of any widow adopting a nun’s habit without joining a religious order first. Just because she’s got a[n optional] wimple, black veil, and black dress on doesn’t mean she’s dressed like a nun. It’s just that black was the color of mourning, so widows wore black, and linen came in white, so their body linens were white, and nuns are popularly conceived of as having worn white and black (even though there were nuns who wore white or undyed cloth or some other variety of drab, apart from black). So, they both dressed modestly according to the standards of the time, but that doesn’t mean widows were dressing like nuns, as in they saw nuns wearing these kicky outfits and thought it looked like a great idea.
Also, once you actually start looking at portraits of women in mourning, they don’t really look much like they’re dressed like nuns.
I’d actually expect it to be more a way of visually presenting status. For example, the similar cloaks in Italy were worn by married women, and I would anticipate it said something similar in The Netherlands. As a very crude generalization, unmarried women and girls covered up less than married women when out of doors, though married women might strip down a bit if they were doing fieldwork or other messy manual labor. This persists for a long time in Western culture – married women covered their heads with caps right up until the 1840s, and then it starts to taper off until it’s almost entirely gone by the 1860s.
However, something like a huik could also be a marker of economic status, in that you were affluent enough you could wear a really bulky, awkward thing and not have to worry about not being able to do stuff. The black color also marks it as quite expensive – true black was really expensive to produce in the 16th century, since it involved several trips through dyebaths of various colors, and faded easily. That much black fabric would require a significant financial outlay, even if you were buying the cheap, not-actually-black stuff. The women who are wearing them are also dressed very nicely and not like working class women for the most part.
I would expect it to mark both economic and marital status of the wearer, though.
I think you’re misunderstanding the ambiguities involved. A number of religious orders, such as the Secular Franciscans, had lay members. Such members, whether male or female, did not take the full vows, did not have to live in a monastery or convent and did not have to wear habits. However, some widows who were lay members did choose to wear a nun’s habit. But were they ‘nuns’? No, no more than their male counterparts were ‘monks’. We wouldn’t describe Michelangelo, Liszt or Pasteur as having been ‘monks’, even although they were lay Secular Franciscans. Beguines were a variation on the same basic concept.
As it happens, the most famous example of a widow joining the Secular Franciscans and then conspicuously wearing the habit of a Poor Clare was the ruler of the Spanish Netherlands at the time these paintings were painted, the Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia. Her habit even survives, preserved in the Convent of the Discalced Carmelites in Brussels. But she was merely following what had become a tradition among widowed Spanish Habsburg women. There is a recent essay by Cordula van Wyhe specifically on this subject (‘The Making and Meaning of the Monastic Habit at Spanish Habsburg Courts’) in the volume, Early Modern Habsburg Women (Ashgate, 2013), edited by Anne J. Cruz and Maria Galli Stampino.
