The Underwear Gap: What Men Wore That Women Didn’t
One of the more surprising gender gaps in medieval clothing is the lack of underwear among women, attested to in an unexpected place — the clothing allowances laid down in monastic rule books.
Men regularly wore some form of linen undershorts (usually referred to as breeches or braies) that covered much the same area as modern briefs. We know this partly because illustrations of men doing heavy outdoor labour (reaping grain, threshing with a flail) show their tunics tucked into their belts, exposing breeches worn below. Women, by contrast, seem to have worn no such garment at all. Illustrations of women working in the fields or stomping grapes always show their long dresses hiked up to expose hose or bare legs beneath, but never anything like a man’s breeches. The strongest confirmation comes from the exceptionally detailed lists of clothing items allocated to religious orders, specifying everything a monk or nun was entitled to wear down to the minutest garment. Lists for monks always include breeches, alongside shirts and stockings, while lists for nuns include chemises and stockings, but never breeches. References to women actually wearing “drawers” do not appear until the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century.
A woman’s only possible layer of underclothing was the chemise — a long, loose linen underdress, effectively a full-length slip, that reached down to about the ankles regardless of how short her outer dress happened to be — so that a woman’s legs were always modestly covered whichever activity she was engaged in.
It’s a minor but nonetheless genuine piece of evidence — and a good example of how even a monastery’s supply list can answer a question that art history alone can’t address.
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