On Tue, 10 Jan 2006, Kate M Bunting wrote: > >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/01/2006 17:23 >>>
> This leads me to ask, and please do not take offense anyone... How did > 16th women deal with their monthly courses without underpants? Rags, I > know, but how were they held up? > We don't really know - such information was too well known/too > distasteful to be written down anywhere. Protection that sticks on to > the underwear is a very recent development, however. Previously a belt > arrangement was used, for which pants were not strictly necessary. Self-stick came in when I was in high school. When I started needing protection in the mid-1970s, we used belts, and belt-style pads were still sold for many years after that. There are occasional written references from the middle ages to menstrual cloths (the one I recall was in the context of a nasty comparison of someone/something as being as foul as one, but I'm afraid I read that before I started keeping track of citations, so I don't recall where it was). For someone who isn't starting from an assumption of the presence of underwear, it's a no-brainer to assume the cloths were either tied up with a diaper sort of arrangement or held in place via a belt. And in fact, Poul Norlund's team found the remnants of a sort of belt on one of the female corpses in Herjolfsnes, Greenland. If I remember right without hauling down the notes, it was an arrangement of linen (rag?) pad within a piece of sealskin slung between the legs, which was held by a linen cord around the hips -- sort of a string bikini. The information is tucked into the medical section of the 1924 archaeological report, not with the clothing, so is often overlooked by people who see and read only the clothing section written by Norlund. I don't think it's mentioned at all by Else Ostergard in Woven into the Earth. The doctor writing the 1924 medical analysis concluded from the deformities in the woman's bones that she might have been incontinent, and deduced that the pad was thus an incontinence pad. Heather Rose Jones has pointed out on this list (and I agree) that it could as easily have been a menstrual pad, a possibility not mentioned at all by the doctor. Either way, though, it shows that at least one medieval woman had a means for catching fluids. (I find it particularly interesting that the people preparing her body for burial did not remove the pad.) (In case all that looks familiar, I cribbed most of it from a post I wrote to this list in September 2004, the last time this came up. And that wasn't the first time we talked about it!) --Robin _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list [email protected] http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
