Hi all and Belinda
especially,
Got a nifty little doctoral thesis in on ILL — Bezeichnungen
Für FrauenKleidungsstücke Und
Kleiderschmuck Im MittelNeiderDeutschen, Zugleich Ein Betrag Zur Kostümkunde by Gudrun Lindskog-Wallenburg. This book
quotes literary sources, inventories and sumptuary laws to date names of types of clothing in Middle Lower
German. This mostly covers
medieval to renaissance words.
I wanted to post what this article had to say about the suckenie. It starts by talking about the 16th century terms in
Northern Germany of assuke and suken, used from 1582 to about 1618. These were women’s outer clothes of wool, generally furred,
made of a fine wool called saie (saye in English?), and possibly decorated
with velvet and silk – similar to a German schaube of the period. Further there are 16th century period woodcuts with
the article of clothing identified
with word and picture. Okay, you ask, what does this have to do with the suckenie?
The author goes on to say the name for these articles of
clothing developed from the word suckenie (in French souquenie, sorquanie),
which were taken from possibly the Polish word suknia or the Bohemian word sukne,
which were all from the Slavic word we have already discussed – sukno for “wool cloth, wool clothing”. Also
mentioned is a reference to the word showing up
in the 1177 German text “Graf
Rudolf”, as well as cross references to Goddard’s work. The footnote to this paragraph refers to the book Le
costume. manual
d’archéologie française depuis les temps merovingiens jusqu’a la renaissance, Paris, 1916, by Camille Enlart – who defines the suckenie as an overgarment worn by both
sexes in the 13th century.
What I find most interesting is that the discussion goes
further to say that the word
developed into ‘cassock’, ‘casaque’, ‘husseke’ and ‘housse’,
all of which can be thought of as a type of warm garment. Of course, there are plenty of examples where a
textile/clothing word meant something completely
different from its original
meaning, so this may not help, but it may be an interesting piece of the puzzle of the suckenie.
~ Katrine / Katherine Barich
Message #866, February 27, 2003