MUSCULUS, Andreas.

Second edition, and the earliest obtainable, of this curious and scarce work entitled ‘The Trouser Devil’, against the recent fashion of baggy trousers, beautifully depicted in the exquisite title woodcut. Andreas Musculus (1514-81) was a Lutheran theologian and reformer, trained at Leipzig and Wittenberg, and later professor at Frankfurt. First published in 1555 (an ed. marked as lost in USTC), ‘Vom Hosen Teuffel’ was his first work. It emerged from a contemporary debate, centred around Wittenberg, concerning the attire customarily worn by university students, with strict regulations, passed in 1546, forbidding shorter gowns and luxury more generally. Most students, at Wittenberg and quickly elsewhere, wore ‘large, perforated hats and wide-cut trousers’ inspired by the medieval fashion; considered ‘harmful’ by the university authorities, baggy trousers were the subject of fines, aimed both at the tailors who made them and the student who wore them (Sixt, pp.54-5). Musculus’ work was a sharp criticism of this fashion, with harsh statements such as: ‘God will strike us with Doomsday, because of this horrible, inhuman, and devilish clothing, which turns young people into monsters and looks so horrible that not only God, the angels, and all pious, honourable people, but also the devils themselves feel disgust by it and abhor it.’ He later invokes the assistance of the civic and university authorities to put an end to this phenomenon in front of which, he says, preachers and clerics are powerless. Indeed, he tells that, after a priest had preached harshly against these baggy trousers, ‘the trouser devils hung such ragged trousers over his pulpit the next Sunday to mock him’. University life in Germany brought about additional issues, including excessive drinking and the carrying of weapons; yet, clothing was also considered something to be controlled, as a visual manifestation of morals. A very interesting, scarce work.