Origins
The mortarboard is generally believed by scholars to have developed from the biretta, a similar-looking hat worn by Roman Catholic clergy. The biretta itself may have been a development of the Roman pileus quadratus, a type of skullcap with superposed square and tump. A reinvention of this type of cap is known as the Bishop Andrewes cap. The Italian biretta is a word derived from berretto, which is derived itself from the Latin birrus and the Greek pyrros, both meaning "red." The cone-shaped red (seldom in black) biretta, related to the ancient Etruscan tutulus and the Roman pileus, was used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to identify humanists, students, artists, and learned and blooming youth in general. The shape and the color conveyed meaning: Red was considered for a long time the royal power, whether because it was difficult to afford vestments of such solid and brilliant dye or because the high symbolic meaning of blood and life, thus the power over life and death.
It is not casual that the capo (captain) headwear is found with such frequency in Renaissance paintings as the highly famous one by Piero della Francesca of Federico da Montefeltro with his red cap. Campano wrote about these hats in his Life of Niccolò Fortebraccio, "he used to wear a red and high hat, the higher from the head the wider it became." Federico and Niccolò were Condottieri. The same cap is seen on Bartolomeo Colleoni, commander of the Venetian Armies in 1454, on the Duke Ludovico II Gonzaga and on John Hawkwood in his equestrian monument by Paolo Uccello. This cap as worn by the leading Italian nobles at the end of the fifteenth century became a symbol of their military and civil powers over Italian cities at a time when the whole of Europe was going to be deeply transformed by Italian influences.
It was originally reserved for holders of master degrees (the highest qualification in mediæval academia) but was later adopted by bachelors and undergraduates. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries corner-cap ("catercap" in the Marprelate tracts) was the term used (OED).
Origins of the most commonly found mortarboard in the United States can be traced to a patent that was filed by an inventor Edward O'Reilly and Catholic priest, Joseph Durham who filed their patent in 1950. Their invention and subsequent patent was the result of his idea to incorporate a metal filling into the mortarboard thus making it more sturdy. Such mortarboards are very commonplace throughout the world today.
Read more about this topic: Square Academic Cap
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
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Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
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—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)