John Owen walking...'in cuerpo'?

christabella_warren · #1 (**permalink**) 10-22-2009, 09:09 PM

All right, brace yourselves everyone: this is the John Owen you've never seen before.

from Littlell's Living Age, Volume 97:

Quote:

...the Vice-Chancellor, for the greater part of South's undergraduateship was the newly appointed Dean of Christ Church, Dr. John Owen, the coryphaeus of the Independents; the same who shocked a poor bible-clerk of Mertou, Anthony Wood, by 'going in quirpo like a young scholar, with powdered hair, snake-bone bandstrings (or bandstrings with very large tassels), lawn band, a large set of ribbonds pointed at his knees, and Spanish leather boots with large lawn tops, and his hat mostly cocked.' Probably this splendid array occasioned much the same kind of 'sensation' in the University, that the present excellent Vice Chancellor would cause if he were to walk down 'the High' in a wide-awake and knicker-bockers.

And another choice, though less detailed selection from a book on Roman apparel:

Quote:

In the "Acte of the Martyrdom of St. Cyprian" we are told that the saint, after his condemnation, took off his dalmatic, which he handed to the deacons who were with him, and went to his death in his linen tunic or shirt. So far the dalmatic—once the national costume of Ualmatia—appears simply as an article of ordinary dress; and it was probably thought as indecorous for an emperor to appear publicly in his dalmatic, without some kind of stately cloak or toga, as it was in the seventeenth century for a Vice-Chancellor of Oxford to walk down the "High," as the handsome Puritan, John Owen, did, " in cuerpo," i e., in doublet and hose, without cloak or gown.

All of a sudden, my admiration for Reverend Owen has (if it was even possible) risen to a still more substantial level.