Medieval underwear is supposed to be the ultimate non-subject: private, practical, and largely invisible. Yet medieval artists kept finding ways to show it—right at the moments when a body matters most.
In manuscripts, panel paintings, and devotional imagery from Northern Europe, men’s undergarments—usually called braies—appear when someone is working, humiliated, punished, exposed, or put on display for a moral lesson. In an article published in the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Carla Tilghman argues that these flashes of underwear are not accidental details. Instead, they act as visual cues that help medieval images communicate ideas about masculinity, class, sanctity, shame, and the viewer’s own act of looking.
Tilghman’s argument hinges on a simple idea: braies are never merely a background detail. As she puts it, “I examine the metonymic nature of visual representations of braies: underwear as a stand-in for the body and ideas about the body.” In other words, when medieval artists reveal underwear, they are often revealing how a culture thought about male bodies.
What braies were—and why art matters so much
Braies were men’s undergarments worn around the hips, secured at the waist—something like linen drawers, sometimes loose and sometimes more fitted depending on period and context. They were meant to sit beneath outer layers, which is one reason they can be surprisingly hard to pin down historically.
Braises – detail from The Trinity Apocalypse – Cambridge, England, Trinity College, MS R.16.2 fol. 30r,
Part of the reason Tilghman leans so heavily on images is practical: medieval underwear rarely survives. That leaves art and literature as some of the richest sources for how people imagined underwear, joked about it, moralised it, and used it to draw lines between proper and improper bodies.
Braies themselves were also changing over this period. Tilghman studies from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when depictions of men’s underwear shift in form and fit, tracking broader fashion changes. Earlier braies are often looser and longer; later braies become shorter and more fitted as hose and shorter outer garments reshape men’s silhouettes. This matters because medieval artists are frequently painting their own present. When braies look contemporary, the image pulls the story into the viewer’s world: the past becomes legible through current clothing, and moral lessons arrive dressed in familiar fabric.
But Tilghman’s main point isn’t simply what braies looked like. It’s what they do in images—and why artists chose to make a usually hidden garment visible.
Underwear and masculinity
Martyrdom of Saint Hippolytus – Wikimedia Commons
Tilghman treats masculinity as something shaped by behaviour, clothing, and social expectation, not simply something a man “has.” In that context, braies matter because they sit right on the edge between being properly dressed and being exposed—so they can mark a body as controlled, vulnerable, shamed, or ridiculous depending on the scene.
She also argues that medieval masculinity was often defined through relationships between men as much as between men and women. As she puts it, “competition between men and domination of other men were even more important than the maintenance of hierarchical power over women.” That helps explain why so many of her examples involve male bodies being watched, judged, disciplined, or displayed.
This is also where the act of looking becomes part of the meaning. Tilghman notes that braies can “emphasize the voyeuristic nature of looking at images,” and that a viewer “can encounter didactic lessons on humility…or both.” In other words, underwear doesn’t just reveal skin in medieval art—it can reveal how masculinity is being constructed, and how the viewer is being invited to see the male body.
Tilghman traces these meanings most clearly in visual culture, where braies appear at moments of exposure—especially in devotional scenes of suffering and in secular scenes of work.
Sacred braies: martyrdom, humiliation, and sanctity
Detail from the Altarpiece of Saint Vincent, by Bernat Martorell – Wikimedia Commons
In religious art, men’s underwear shows up in the worst moments—when someone is being stripped, punished, or killed. Tilghman argues that this isn’t just realism. Artists use braies to make the body feel shockingly present, while still keeping the scene within the limits of modesty.
One of her chief examples is the Martyrdom of Saint Hippolytus, created at the end of the fifteenth century. Hippolytus is stretched out in the centre of the image, wearing white linen braies that stand out against the greenery. Tilghman writes how, “viewers face a lesson in the art of saintly sacrifice but are also titillated with horrified anticipation as they wait, breathless, for the rending of flesh and tearing of Hippolytus’s body by horses that seem about to gallop out of the picture frame, past or over the viewer.”
For Tilghman, the underwear does two things at once. First, it marks humiliation: Hippolytus has been stripped down to almost nothing. But it also marks sanctity. The braies are clean, white, and intact, even as the body is being brutalised. In that contrast, Tilghman sees a visual message: the saint is being shamed in public, but the painting turns that shame into proof of spiritual strength: “Through that performance, in that garb, shame becomes transformed into a defiant spectacle of shamelessness.”
She links this to other martyr images too. In Bernat Martorell’s Altarpiece of Saint Vincent (1438–40), Vincent is shown being tortured while still wearing “perfectly clean, snug white linen braies.” The point is not that medieval artists were obsessed with underwear; it’s that underwear becomes the last layer where meaning gathers—where modesty, humiliation, and holiness meet.
Secular braies: labour, class, and the viewer
Rye threshers wearing loose, knee-length braies. Detail from Martyrologe-Obituaire de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Lat. 12834), fol. 64v
Tilghman shows that braies aren’t only meaningful in scenes of saints and suffering. In everyday images, especially peasant work, underwear helps artists tell you who a person is and where they belong in the social order.
She starts with very straightforward “work” scenes in manuscripts. In the Rutland Psalter (c. 1260) and the Martyrologe-Obituaire de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (c. 1250–90), threshers are shown mid-swing, dressed for hard labour rather than display: braies tied at the waist (sometimes also at the knee), paired with little else. Tilghman sums up the visual message in one line: “Braies here illustrate their class and secure their appropriate modesty.”
Hunter in braies. Detail from Tacuinum Sanitatis – Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Lat. nouv. acq. 1673, fol. 91v
From there she moves to scenes that are more playful—and sharper in how they invite the viewer to look. A key set of examples comes from copies of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a richly illustrated health manual. Tilghman notes that, in these images, peasants are not just working; they’re arranged to be looked at. One scene shows a hunter in snug braies thrusting a spear into a boar; Tilghman notes there is on “a salacious quality to the portrayal of the man’s prominently displayed round rump and muscular legs.”
Detail from the July scene in Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry
Tilghman links this classed way of looking to the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. She argues that its calendar scenes present an ideal world—“Calm, orderly scenes convey a sense of ideal social order”—but also reminds readers that “it is all, of course, an illusion created for the pleasure of the Duke.” For her, this Book of Hours can even blend devotion with bodily display: “In the Très Riches Heures, sacred devotion and secular carnality are combined.” She points to the July harvest scene, where a worker appears “barefoot and wearing short white braies.”
Put simply, in these secular images braies help mark peasants as working bodies—and they make those bodies easy to look at. Sometimes that supports a tidy message about labour and order; sometimes it encourages a more amused, suggestive kind of viewing.
What Underwear Reveals
From pious martyrs to peasants in the field, Tilghman shows that braies appear in medieval art when an image wants the viewer to notice the male body—its vulnerability, its status, and the meaning attached to being seen. As she explains:
Depictions of braies do not lack meaning, but many of those meanings have been relatively unexplored. When braies are depicted in certain artworks, they not only contribute to and support the primary meaning created by other pictured objects but sometimes create meaning in and of themselves.
Her takeaway is that braies are worth reading closely. Once you start paying attention to them, they become a clue to what medieval artists were doing with bodies—how they framed shame and sanctity, labour and class, and the viewer’s role in looking.
The article, “Semper Ubi Sub Ubi: Representations of Male Underwear in Northern European Art, 1140–1450,” by Carla Tilghman, appears in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Number 19. You can get a copy from Boydell & Brewer or from Amazon.com.
Carla Tilghman is an Adjunct Lecturer at The University of Kansas and Washburn University. You can read more of Carla’s work on her Academia.edu page.
Medieval underwear is supposed to be the ultimate non-subject: private, practical, and largely invisible. Yet medieval artists kept finding ways to show it—right at the moments when a body matters most.
In manuscripts, panel paintings, and devotional imagery from Northern Europe, men’s undergarments—usually called braies—appear when someone is working, humiliated, punished, exposed, or put on display for a moral lesson. In an article published in the journal Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Carla Tilghman argues that these flashes of underwear are not accidental details. Instead, they act as visual cues that help medieval images communicate ideas about masculinity, class, sanctity, shame, and the viewer’s own act of looking.
Tilghman’s argument hinges on a simple idea: braies are never merely a background detail. As she puts it, “I examine the metonymic nature of visual representations of braies: underwear as a stand-in for the body and ideas about the body.” In other words, when medieval artists reveal underwear, they are often revealing how a culture thought about male bodies.
What braies were—and why art matters so much
Braies were men’s undergarments worn around the hips, secured at the waist—something like linen drawers, sometimes loose and sometimes more fitted depending on period and context. They were meant to sit beneath outer layers, which is one reason they can be surprisingly hard to pin down historically.
Part of the reason Tilghman leans so heavily on images is practical: medieval underwear rarely survives. That leaves art and literature as some of the richest sources for how people imagined underwear, joked about it, moralised it, and used it to draw lines between proper and improper bodies.
Braies themselves were also changing over this period. Tilghman studies from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, when depictions of men’s underwear shift in form and fit, tracking broader fashion changes. Earlier braies are often looser and longer; later braies become shorter and more fitted as hose and shorter outer garments reshape men’s silhouettes. This matters because medieval artists are frequently painting their own present. When braies look contemporary, the image pulls the story into the viewer’s world: the past becomes legible through current clothing, and moral lessons arrive dressed in familiar fabric.
But Tilghman’s main point isn’t simply what braies looked like. It’s what they do in images—and why artists chose to make a usually hidden garment visible.
Underwear and masculinity
Tilghman treats masculinity as something shaped by behaviour, clothing, and social expectation, not simply something a man “has.” In that context, braies matter because they sit right on the edge between being properly dressed and being exposed—so they can mark a body as controlled, vulnerable, shamed, or ridiculous depending on the scene.
She also argues that medieval masculinity was often defined through relationships between men as much as between men and women. As she puts it, “competition between men and domination of other men were even more important than the maintenance of hierarchical power over women.” That helps explain why so many of her examples involve male bodies being watched, judged, disciplined, or displayed.
This is also where the act of looking becomes part of the meaning. Tilghman notes that braies can “emphasize the voyeuristic nature of looking at images,” and that a viewer “can encounter didactic lessons on humility…or both.” In other words, underwear doesn’t just reveal skin in medieval art—it can reveal how masculinity is being constructed, and how the viewer is being invited to see the male body.
Tilghman traces these meanings most clearly in visual culture, where braies appear at moments of exposure—especially in devotional scenes of suffering and in secular scenes of work.
Sacred braies: martyrdom, humiliation, and sanctity
In religious art, men’s underwear shows up in the worst moments—when someone is being stripped, punished, or killed. Tilghman argues that this isn’t just realism. Artists use braies to make the body feel shockingly present, while still keeping the scene within the limits of modesty.
One of her chief examples is the Martyrdom of Saint Hippolytus, created at the end of the fifteenth century. Hippolytus is stretched out in the centre of the image, wearing white linen braies that stand out against the greenery. Tilghman writes how, “viewers face a lesson in the art of saintly sacrifice but are also titillated with horrified anticipation as they wait, breathless, for the rending of flesh and tearing of Hippolytus’s body by horses that seem about to gallop out of the picture frame, past or over the viewer.”
For Tilghman, the underwear does two things at once. First, it marks humiliation: Hippolytus has been stripped down to almost nothing. But it also marks sanctity. The braies are clean, white, and intact, even as the body is being brutalised. In that contrast, Tilghman sees a visual message: the saint is being shamed in public, but the painting turns that shame into proof of spiritual strength: “Through that performance, in that garb, shame becomes transformed into a defiant spectacle of shamelessness.”
She links this to other martyr images too. In Bernat Martorell’s Altarpiece of Saint Vincent (1438–40), Vincent is shown being tortured while still wearing “perfectly clean, snug white linen braies.” The point is not that medieval artists were obsessed with underwear; it’s that underwear becomes the last layer where meaning gathers—where modesty, humiliation, and holiness meet.
Secular braies: labour, class, and the viewer
Tilghman shows that braies aren’t only meaningful in scenes of saints and suffering. In everyday images, especially peasant work, underwear helps artists tell you who a person is and where they belong in the social order.
She starts with very straightforward “work” scenes in manuscripts. In the Rutland Psalter (c. 1260) and the Martyrologe-Obituaire de Saint-Germain-des-Prés (c. 1250–90), threshers are shown mid-swing, dressed for hard labour rather than display: braies tied at the waist (sometimes also at the knee), paired with little else. Tilghman sums up the visual message in one line: “Braies here illustrate their class and secure their appropriate modesty.”
From there she moves to scenes that are more playful—and sharper in how they invite the viewer to look. A key set of examples comes from copies of the Tacuinum Sanitatis, a richly illustrated health manual. Tilghman notes that, in these images, peasants are not just working; they’re arranged to be looked at. One scene shows a hunter in snug braies thrusting a spear into a boar; Tilghman notes there is on “a salacious quality to the portrayal of the man’s prominently displayed round rump and muscular legs.”
Tilghman links this classed way of looking to the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. She argues that its calendar scenes present an ideal world—“Calm, orderly scenes convey a sense of ideal social order”—but also reminds readers that “it is all, of course, an illusion created for the pleasure of the Duke.” For her, this Book of Hours can even blend devotion with bodily display: “In the Très Riches Heures, sacred devotion and secular carnality are combined.” She points to the July harvest scene, where a worker appears “barefoot and wearing short white braies.”
Put simply, in these secular images braies help mark peasants as working bodies—and they make those bodies easy to look at. Sometimes that supports a tidy message about labour and order; sometimes it encourages a more amused, suggestive kind of viewing.
What Underwear Reveals
From pious martyrs to peasants in the field, Tilghman shows that braies appear in medieval art when an image wants the viewer to notice the male body—its vulnerability, its status, and the meaning attached to being seen. As she explains:
Depictions of braies do not lack meaning, but many of those meanings have been relatively unexplored. When braies are depicted in certain artworks, they not only contribute to and support the primary meaning created by other pictured objects but sometimes create meaning in and of themselves.
Her takeaway is that braies are worth reading closely. Once you start paying attention to them, they become a clue to what medieval artists were doing with bodies—how they framed shame and sanctity, labour and class, and the viewer’s role in looking.
The article, “Semper Ubi Sub Ubi: Representations of Male Underwear in Northern European Art, 1140–1450,” by Carla Tilghman, appears in Medieval Clothing and Textiles, Number 19. You can get a copy from Boydell & Brewer or from Amazon.com.
Carla Tilghman is an Adjunct Lecturer at The University of Kansas and Washburn University. You can read more of Carla’s work on her Academia.edu page.
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