DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.67419#0216
194 NEEDLEWORK IN COSTUME.
This high bonnet had been worn, under various
modifications, ever since the fashion was brought
from the East in the time of the Crusades. Some
were of a sugar-loaf form, three feet in height;
and some cylindrical, but still very high. The
French modistes of that day called this formidable
head-gear bonnet a la Syrienne. But our author
says, if female vanity be violently restrained in one
point, it is sure to break out in another; and Romish
anathemas having abolished curls from shading fair
brows, so much the more attention was paid to head-
gear, that the bonnets and caps increased every year
most awfully in height and size, and were made in
the form of crescents, pyramids, and horns of such
tremendous dimensions, that the old chronicler
Juvenal des Ursins makes this pathetic lamentation
in his History of Charles VI. :—
“ Et avoient les dames et damoyselles de chacun
coste, deux grandes oreilles si larges, que quand
elles vouloient passer par 1’huis d’une chambre il
fallait qu’elles se tournassent de coste et baisassent,
ou elles n’eussent pu passerthat is, “ on every
side old ladies and young ladies were seen with such
high and monstrous ears (or horns), that when they
wanted to enter a room they were obliged perforce
to stoop and crouch sideways, or they could not
pass.” At last a regular attack was made on the
high head-gear of the fifteenth century by a popular
monk, in his sermons at Notre Dame, in which he
so pathetically lamented the sinfulness and enormi-
ties of such a fashion, that the ladies, to show their
contrition, made auto da fes of their Syrian bonnets
in the public squares and market-places; and as the
This high bonnet had been worn, under various
modifications, ever since the fashion was brought
from the East in the time of the Crusades. Some
were of a sugar-loaf form, three feet in height;
and some cylindrical, but still very high. The
French modistes of that day called this formidable
head-gear bonnet a la Syrienne. But our author
says, if female vanity be violently restrained in one
point, it is sure to break out in another; and Romish
anathemas having abolished curls from shading fair
brows, so much the more attention was paid to head-
gear, that the bonnets and caps increased every year
most awfully in height and size, and were made in
the form of crescents, pyramids, and horns of such
tremendous dimensions, that the old chronicler
Juvenal des Ursins makes this pathetic lamentation
in his History of Charles VI. :—
“ Et avoient les dames et damoyselles de chacun
coste, deux grandes oreilles si larges, que quand
elles vouloient passer par 1’huis d’une chambre il
fallait qu’elles se tournassent de coste et baisassent,
ou elles n’eussent pu passerthat is, “ on every
side old ladies and young ladies were seen with such
high and monstrous ears (or horns), that when they
wanted to enter a room they were obliged perforce
to stoop and crouch sideways, or they could not
pass.” At last a regular attack was made on the
high head-gear of the fifteenth century by a popular
monk, in his sermons at Notre Dame, in which he
so pathetically lamented the sinfulness and enormi-
ties of such a fashion, that the ladies, to show their
contrition, made auto da fes of their Syrian bonnets
in the public squares and market-places; and as the