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Sprang Discussion
Beatrix' comment to yesterday's blog post merits an answer. I was originally planning to do that in the comment section, but it is a little too long for that, and I ended up wanting images, so here's my reply.
In one of the articles published about the piece, a 57 cm head circumference is mentioned as the reconstructed head size for the cap to fit, which corresponds to an not overly large modern woman's head (I think the article is the one in the Collingwood memorial volume, "Crafting Textiles"). If one looks at the re-drawings of caps worn by women in the article "Enigmatic Beauty", the ones showing the back are all going down into the nape of the neck and are fully covered by the ties, with the sprang panel sometimes jutting out a bit (presumably to accommodate a hairbun). A very nice example is online in the collection of the GNM. In no case I have been able to find, either on the images referred to in "Enigmatic Beauty" nor on other images, the lower end of the sprang panel being visible; the ties always sit low, always cut across the sprang at its full width, and with the sprang panel pattern visible right above the ties.
Both the reconstruction and the original on the images in the "Crafting Textiles" book sit fairly high up on the dummy head, and the reconstruction is also shown from the back. There, it is possible to see the double-thread sprang passage just on top of the crossed ties, which is about mid-way up the back of the head. That is not what I would consider a "good fit" compared to the contemporary images. Coincidentally, if wearing the hair in a bun, this is the typical place where most of the hair mass would sit. Placing the ties just there makes the whole arrangement either quite uncomfortable or insecure, in my personal test results.
This is the cap done, as best as possible, to the measurements given in the articles about the piece. The sprang section is 27 cm long allover. As you can see on the left, the cap sits right at my hairline, not especially deep in the forehead. On the right, you can see how it looked after careful arranging of the ties so that they more or less covered the lower edge of the panel. It took some fiddling, and you can still see a little gap. The ties are definitely not crossing low on the nape of the neck here.
For the sake of full disclosure on my head size: My head measures 57 cm around on ear level if I measure over all my hair put up in a bun. It is 52.5 cm measured at the same place without hair. The circumference going from below the hairline in front of the forehead to the nape of my neck and back is exactly 52 cm. Measurement from front of hairline in the middle of the forehead to the nape of the neck, across the middle of my head and down to the nape, going over the bun lets me come out at about 37 cm.
(And now you know more about my head measurements than you ever wanted to know.)
Now, this specific cap might have been worn differently, or on a much smaller head, resulting in a different fit, which might well have been the case, and so a 27 cm sprang panel might have been the correct full length. It might have been worn by a small child, for all we know.
But then the maths still does not add up. We have a full length of 27 cm of the complete sprang panel stated, measured from top to bottom. I assume this does include the double-thread passage at the end, as there is nothing mentioned anywhere to hint at this being only the patterned section.
On one of the images published in the article "Linen sprang from Lengberg Castle", it is possible to measure the length of one of the lozenges in the pattern. I get about 1.8 to 2 cm, so let's stick with 1.8 as the smaller measure.
That pattern element consists of 10 rows, which gives each row an approximate height of 1.8 mm. The complete pattern has 186 numbered rows, as published after Carol Jones' reconstruction in the article "Enigmatic Beauty". There is one un-numbered row above row 1, which is a plain 1-1 row. (There are some numbering hiccups in the pattern, looking at the numbers on the side, but they even out.) In addition to these main pattern rows, there is the slightly wider row formed around the starting thread, and because the pattern holes in the image mentioned above only start at a little distance from that starting thread, there have to be two more plain rows before the pattern start (of which one would be the un-numbered 1-1 row in the pattern). Then there's an additional seven rows done with double threads at the very end, narrowing down the panel.
So we have 188 sprang rows, plus the slightly thicker starting row around the anchor thread, plus the seven double-thread rows. Even if we say all of these are no larger than the 1.8 mm found above, a total of 196 rows times 1.8 mm results in 352.8 mm - so 35 cm and a bit. Consequently, one thing must be incorrect: either the 27 cm total panel length, or the pattern description as given, with the 1.5 repetitions of the motif.
Which means either the sprang pattern length would need to be revisited, or one of the measurements somewhere has a typo or was erroneous (which we all know can happen, or, as the German physicists taught me, "Wer mißt, mißt Mist" because something can always go more or less wrong), or there is something else somewhere that would explain the discrepancies. I cannot say which is the case - only what I have found from trying to work the reconstruction as described in the articles.
Literature referred to:
Nutz, Beatrix, Case, Rachel and James, Carol 2021. A unique survival: A woman's fifteenth-century headdress from Lengberg Castle, East Tyrol. In: PRITCHARD, F. (ed.) Crafting Textiles: Tablet Weaving, Sprang, Lace and Other Techniques from the Bronze Age to the Early 17th Century. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Case, Rachel, Nutz, Beatrix and James, Carol. 2019. Enigmatic Beauty. The Decorative Headwear of Lengberg Castle.
Comments 7
If you look at my own photos of me wearing the headwear, you can get a better idea of how it fits a person. I also believe the hairstyle that would have been worn under this style of headwear would not have been a bun--in none of the artwork showing this style of headwear can you see any bulk of a bun. Rather, women most likely wore their hair in braids secured around and over the crown of the head, reducing bulk and providing that "wulst" effect. Additionally, if the headwear is worn a little further back on the head with a bit of the hairline visible, as seen in many of the artworks, the sprang panel will reach the nape of the neck. I was able to get the headwear to sit that way attractively. Finally, many depictions of this hairstyle show a lower profile and are not as "puffy" as the example you linked. The smaller profile of the Lengberg headwear matches more closely with the close-fitting ones from the examples in our paper.
Hi Rachel, I have looked for more photos of you, but that was not very successful. I found a link on pinterest, but the blog post it pointed to seems to have disappeared. So maybe you can give me a hint as to where to look?
Also, is the sprang panel that was published in the Collingwood volume (A unique survival) the version that Beatrix was mentioning, where you achieved the 27 cm length?
And pictorial sources show that this type of headdress was not only worn by women, but also by some men. They would not have to hide a bun underneath. And men can also be rather small. Anthropological analyses on skeletons from a medieval graveyard in Tyrol showed that some were only approx. 159 cm tall.
Well, this is certainly developing into an interesting discussion.
Firstly, going from that lovely list of depictions that you have put together (in Enigmatic Beauty, for example), it is not always totally sure where the cap sits exactly - but most of the images seem, to me, to be placed at or a little below the front hairline, and go down across the whole head. There is one image I can find in that list where the front hairline is clearly visible, the others all seem to cover the front hairline. So unless there is a number of images not in that list that I am not aware of yet, I would argue that the more usual style of wearing would be coverage of the front hairline.
Regarding the having or not having of hair volume - if I take all my hair out of the way, the 27 cm length will still only go down to middle of my back of the head (in fact, the panel ends right over the normal place of my bun). So if I want a cap that does fit like, for instance, the one in the image linked to in the post, or this one dating to the 15th century, the cap, as stated in my first post, would need to be larger, even if I place my hair in the least voluminous manner. We can indeed not see much regarding the hair underneath, or how it would have been worn, but as all the images and all the written sources that I have found about the length of women's hair gives a normal minimal length to the waist-hip area, we will have to assume that even with a low-volume hairdo underneath the cap, there will have been some additional space necessary to fit it.
Regarding men's wearing these caps, if Rachel's hypothesis about there being very little bulk due to the hair arrangement holds true, then there may not have been a marked difference between male and female head sizes. A quick search turns up this study, for example, where men's skulls are in all dimensions larger than women's skulls, which fits in with their generally larger size compared to women.
There's more interesting questions regarding the people who wear this kind of headdress, and in what circumstances, but that is something for another blogpost. However, if as both of you state the 27 cm are correct - how can the discrepancy between the reconstructed sprang pattern length of more than 190 rows and the amount of sprang of that size that can be fitted into 27 cm be resolved?
There is something Rachel did not mention. She told me: "Well, I worked with the measurements we took, and reconstructed the sprang pattern nearly perfectly. It was incredibly difficult to get the sprang pattern to fit within the 27 cm but I did it in the end, pretty closely, in my opinion."
So you CAN fit the pattern in the 27 cm.
Maybe you used thread that was slightly too thick. It was difficult to measure the thread diameter, but what we got was a max. of 0.7 mm. But thread thickness is not consistent. It can go down to 0.5 mm. Depending on what occurs most - lets say it´s 0.5 mm. If your thread is 0.6 or 0.7 that can add up quite a bit and make you miss the 27 cm mark.
I was not referring to Rachel's reconstruction (is the reconstruction you refer to the one photographed in the "Unique Survival" article, by the way?), but to the maths issues I had with looking at the images of the original and the size of pattern elements there, and then trying to calculate length per row/total length. The lozenge pattern element a little below the start of the pattern is fairly clear, and thus rather good to measure, making it a rather obvious choice for a comparison between original and reconstructions. My questions arose because of what I realised there regarding the length of the lozenge as compared to the total pattern length, not because of the question whether one can get X numbers of rows into X cm of length.
It is of course possible that my thread is a tiny bit too thick - but all apart from that, as described, when looking only at the original I get inconclusive results when trying to estimate complete length from the photographed part to the full number of reconstructed rows, even if going with the lower end of measurements.
While we all know that photographs can be misleading, and textiles whether in person or on a photograph are notoriously hard to measure, my experience is that if there are discrepancies, it's always worth a second look at the thing - because usually there's some interesting detail to be found.
That lozenge pattern element is not a photograph, but a scan. So it should be to scale. But I pinned the sprang down and by doing that I stretched it a bit (width AND lengthwise) to make the pattern better visible. So I wouldn´t calculate the length per row/total length based on that.
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