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    Menswear of the Lombards. Reflections in the light of archeology, iconography and written sources
    Menswear of the Lombards. Reflections in the light of archeology, iconography and written sources
    Menswear of the Lombards. Reflections in the light of archeology, iconography and written sources
    Ebook171 pages1 hour

    Menswear of the Lombards. Reflections in the light of archeology, iconography and written sources

    By Yuri Godino

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    Often considered to be “the most barbaric among barbarian populations”, the Lombards actually boast one of the most prosperous and complex civilizations of the Migration Period, able to bequeath refined cultural and artistic treasures, as well as enchanting crafts. This paper aims at focusing on menswear, a cornerstone of the Lombard culture which used to be an essential expression of status for the German societies. The main goal is to offer a consistent and useful summary of the historical data, providing the reader with an up-to-date bibliographic support and a series of reconstructive interpretations, both encouraging a critical approach to the subject and helping the work of mostly any meticulous re-enactor. Textile materials, colors and clothing are described using documentary, archaeological and iconographic sources from the Lombard kingdom in Italy, comparing them with the evidence pertaining to Germanic Europe and the neighboring Mediterranean world. In addition, the author revisits the currently known theories on the spatha suspension belt, a basic element of the armed man equipment.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookstones Edizioni Soc. Coop. a r.l.
    Release dateDec 26, 2016
    ISBN9788898275472
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      Menswear of the Lombards. Reflections in the light of archeology, iconography and written sources - Yuri Godino

      Bibliography

      A brief introduction to the study

      "As archaeologists, we do not believe that there is one past, knowable and acceptable to everyone, but rather we acknowlegde that there are many interpretations of the past to which different individuals or groups – for a wide range of different reasons – choose to subscribe"[1].

      (P. Stone, G. Planel, 1999, pg. 1)

      A brief introduction to the study

      This paper aims at the analysis of historical sources about men's clothing in the Lombard period. Research is born within the Project Presenze Longobarde[2], a part of AReS – Archeologia, Reenactment e Storia[3], and it led to the material reconstruction of some typical male clothing of the Lombard context.

      Fig. 1. Reconstruction of some Lombard figures, due to Project Presenze Longobarde (picture by Camillo Balossini, Morophotolab 2015).

      The work turned out to be a hard and difficult challenge: leaving aside the traditional stereotypes that surround the Early Middle Ages (the darkest centuries among the dark ages), the information appeared, at the very beginning of the search, incomplete and basically limited. However, the collection of data and the intersection of different sources have revealed an unexpected richness of elements, allowing now to draw a detailed picture, rich in food for thought.

      The main goal of this paper is to present the reader with a work of historical data synthesis, offering to future searches a bibliographic tool as current as possible; however, it is obvious and inevitable that an operation of this type of content may generate subjective interpretations, which I hope will help develop a debate - serious, serene and profitable - among those who deal with Lombard clothing.

      In the light of the particular study case, it is necessary to make some clarifications.

      This work has used archaeological data, written sources and iconographic evidence that helped to create an extremely uneven collection of data: to make an example, the different textile weaves used are better known than the form of the various models of shoes in use at that time.

      The continuous development of complex methods in archaeological investigation allows to develop insights focused on specific material aspects of the issue, but too often the current state of knowledge does not allow to answer questions of a general nature. Similarly, the analysis of a written record can help to identify the name of a piece of clothing – such as the hosis mentioned by Paul The Deacon – whose function and shape are however missing.

      The different nature of the sources involved is the main reason of the chronological limits to the research: they embrace the period from the second half of the sixth century A.D. - with the appearance of the first Lombard grave goods in Italy - to the years around the end of the Regnum Langobardorum, finally conquered by Charlemagne in 774.

      Archaeological studies carried out on the grave goods - in fact, the fundamental part of the knowledge on the Lombard fashion - have now reached a high level of detail; a good bibliographical research enables to date a piece of grave goods with a margin of error of about 20-30 years. On the other hand, it is not possible to achieve such precision in the field of clothing as a set of garments; aside from the modest - but precious - fragments of increasingly recovered tissue during archaeological investigations, has not come down to us any complete useful garment to outline a Lombard fashion.

      The clothing study of the Lombards is possible, therefore, only by pooling heterogeneous information covering a time span of about two centuries; this situation, which results frustrating for the researcher but inevitable at the present state of knowledge, does not allow to trace an evolution of the Lombard fashion during this period of time, but it allows us to describe a generic Lombard costume.

      The Lombards used to bury their deceased with clothes probably in their national clothing[4]. At the present state of research, however, with few exceptions[5], we cannot determine whether special clothing belonged to different social statuses[6]: a differentiation is only identifiable by the type of fabric (material and weave) and it is conceivable for the colour of the fabrics.

      The attempt to understand which clothes were in use in the cultural context in question was carried out by examining the sources only referred to as Lombard. These sources, which can be defined main sources, were compared and completed with secondary sources, where possible: information from the contemporary European context (in particular, the Merovingian and the Alamanno-Bavarian fields, material cultures very similar to the Lombard heritage) and the Roman - Mediterranean world. In this sense, we wanted to look for a foreign comparison with the clothing appeared in Lombard sources, while we wanted to avoid the opposite way, namely to justify foreign elements in Lombard costume. In the part dedicated to the material, I have taken into account extra-Lombard sources coming from the Germanic world, as the scarcity of information available did not allow to develop a discourse on fabrics and colours.

      I believe that these clarifications are necessary to explain my decision to develop a reflection using only sources close to the Lombard culture. Too often, in the reconstructions of early medieval clothes, sources with plenty of information are used, but far from to the issue discussed here, in terms of history or cultural reference: the data provided by evidence such as the description of Charlemagne's clothing by Eginardo, from Pace del Duca Orso or the wonderful figures of the Psalters in Stuttgart or Utrecht can be vital to the understanding of some issues, such as the colours of the clothes or the development of some decorative types, but we risk to expand dramatically the time span and miss the final aim.

      Fig. 2. Pace del Duca Orso, 9th century, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Cividale del Friuli (UD), Italy.

      The relationship between Germanic and Roman fashion culture remains hard to define. Despite the laws passed by Liutprando oblige the Romans to dress in a Lombard style[7], implying a fashion differentiation between the two cultures, the analysis of archaeological and iconographic sources of the data outline a much more complex picture, from the earliest years of the Italian phase. Iconographic sources generally used for the reconstruction of Lombard clothing - Plate of Isola Rizza and the Altar of Ratchis, to make an example - are products of Roman craft workers[8] but it is unclear if the depicted garments are typical clothing of the Lombard or of the Roman period: the tunic worn by the barbarian of Isola Rizza shares several features with clothing of a clear Mediterranean origin, as shown below. Based on historical sources, the Lombard fashion appears as the result of models, heterogeneous culture and ideas, in which Germanic, Mediterranean and Christian items live together, a typical characteristic of the whole material culture of Italy at the end of 6th- 7th century. A significant event of this circulation of models and heterogeneous cultural elements is represented, from an archaeological point of view, by the case of the Crypta Balbi in Rome, where, in a Roman Ergasterion, were produced, among others, typically Lombard objects[9].

      Clothing in historical cultures has played a fundamental role, namely, the need to cover up and get dressed. However, fashion is first of all an extraordinary instrument of expression of social status, especially in Germanic society, where the grave goods show a continuous search for identity in the costume of the buried. Understanding the different shades of the Lombard fashion could provide interesting information about the early medieval society, allowing to define all the social barriers that lined individual and collective identities. Talking about clothes means facing a range of research, dipping in a complex cultural system made of handicrafts, trade, anthropological messages, cultural horizons and personal choices; fashion is made up of technological, economic, cultural and social layers, whose study offers an insight into how the Lombard man used to think and behave. It is the study of the language through which a character communicated its position to the members of his community.

      During the excavation of a Lombard tomb, what emerges are the grave goods consisting of metallic elements, the only objects - except in special cases - which have been preserved in their entirety. When submitting to the general public, the majority of people mentally connects the tomb to the metal package; unconsciously, preserved objects will become the 80 or 90% of the clothes of the buried. However, if we focus on these ornaments, we will notice that they represent

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