Hi, All. There was also a consideration that the belt was there to help
keep in place a pessary of cloth, a sort of "plug" to assist with a
condition called "prolapsed uterus". With no real human tissue left in
place, it was an assumption, but a proceedure similar to it is mentioned
in 16th Cent. medical texts. Mike T.
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.)
_______________________________________________
h-costume mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
