How Medieval Jewish Sages Felt About Push-up Bras
Historian Merav Schnitzer talks about the medieval clothing revolution, a bra described by 11th-century scholar Rashi and how Jewish women managed to take their house keys with them to synagogue on Shabbat
Tell me what you do.
I am a historian, a researcher of material culture in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. Basically, what I did for most of my career was to read medieval texts relating to halakha (Jewish law) and use them to write the period’s social history. In practice I was taught to sit in an archive, read various sources and extract the historical material from them. The texts were my tool. But a few years ago, while doing my post-doc, something surprising happened to me. I was conducting a comparison between a text and an object, a piece of jewelry, and suddenly a new and exciting world opened up to me.