I am chronically bored and so I have to find ways to bust my boredom. I was talking to a buddy who does fabulous whitework about a trade - I think I've hit my limit when it comes to costuming. I don't have to know how to do everything myself! And we started talking about a very specific style of coif/veil combination and oorijzers, the belle of the 16th century ball.
Except I haven't yet found any references to oorijzers as such in the 16th century. Words change. Camiknickers and step-ins; two words used for basically the same garment and now not many people know what they are. As far as I can tell, the earliest actual find listed as an oorijzer by museums is dated as circa 1580 but they don't appear to show up in the written record as that. Of course that particular inventory may have not been unearthed yet.
It's even more confusing because so many websites say "Oorijzer have been used since the 16th century" and yet they cite no reference.
Hester Dibbits says in Vertrouwd bezit
Materiële cultuur in
Doesburg en Maassluis,
1650-1800, "Het is niet onwaarschijnlijk dat het hier een betrekkelijk nieuw accessoire
betrof. In Vlaardingen is het oorijzer in 1636 nog niet zo algemeen gangbaar
dat men volstond met een simpele aanduiding; een Vlaardingse weduwe
legateerde aan een van haar naasten: ‘een zilveren mutsband, anders genaamd
een ijserken’." In 1674 "in een advertentie in de
Amsterdamsche Courant bij het signalement van een vermiste vrouw uit
Breda wordt opgemerkt dat zij ‘sonder Oor-yser’ is." (p. 200).
Basically, they weren't a new accessory but they weren't so common that they had a simple name as of 1636.
I still have no idea what they were called, if anything, in the 16th century Netherlands. I'm wondering if mutsband might have been more common, but the etymological dictionary doesn't have that listed.
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