Dictionary Definition
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Noun
- A bottle of wine (usually Bordeaux) containing 0.250 liters of fluid, 1/3 the volume of a standard bottle.
- A type of women's platform shoe that was popular in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Quotations
- 1602 : Hamlet by William
Shakespeare, act 2 scene 2 lines 364-365
- By'r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven
- than when I saw you last by the altitude of a chopine.
- By'r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven
- 1922 : Ulysses
by James
Joyce, chapter 9
- He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a chopine…
French
Noun
chopine- A type of women's clog or overshoe with a thick or raised sole like a platform shoe, typically made of wood, and popular in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Extensive Definition
A chopine is a type of women's platform
shoe that was popular in the 15th,
16th
and 17th
centuries. Chopines were originally used as a clog or overshoe to protect the shoes
and dress from mud and street soil.
Chopines were popularly worn in Venice by both
courtesans and
patrician women from ca. 1400-1700. Besides their practical uses,
the height of the chopine became a symbolic reference to the
cultural and social standing of the wearer; the higher the chopine,
the higher the status of the wearer. High chopines allowed a woman
to literally and figuratively tower over others.
During the Renaissance,
chopines became an article of women's fashion and were made
increasingly taller; some extant examples are over 20 inches (50 cm) high. Surviving
chopines are typically made of wood, or cork, and
those in the Spanish style were sometimes banded about with
metal. Extant pieces are
covered with leather,
brocades, or jewel-embroidered velvet. Often, the fabric of the
chopine matched the dress or the shoe, but not always.
According to some scholars, chopines caused an
unstable and inelegant gait. Women wearing them were generally
accompanied by a servant or attendant on whom they could balance
themselves. Other scholars have argued that with practice a woman
could walk and even dance gracefully. In his dancing manual
Nobilità di dame (1600), the Italian dancing master Fabritio
Caroso writes that with care a woman practiced in wearing her
chopines could move “with grace, seemliness, and beauty” and even
"dance flourishes and galliard variations". Chopines
were usually put on with the help of two servants.
In the fifteenth
century, chopines were also the style in Spain. Their
popularity in Spain was so great that the larger part of the
nation's cork supplies went towards production of the shoes. Some
argue that the style originated in Spain, as there are many extant
examples and a great amount of pictorial and written reference
going back to the 14th century Chopines of the Spanish style were
more often conical and symmetric, while their Venetian counterparts
are much more artistically carved. That is not to say, however,
that Spanish chopines were not adorned; on the contrary, there is
evidence of jeweling, gilt lettering along the surround (the
material covering the cork or wooden base), tooling, and embroidery
on Spanish chopines.
There are a great deal of cognates of the word
chopine (chapiney, choppins, etc.), however neither the word
chopine nor any word similar to it (chioppino, cioppino, etc)
appears in either Florio's 1598 or 1611 dictionary. The Italian
word, instead, seems to be "zoccoli," which likely comes from the
Italian word "zocco," meaning a stump or a block of wood. Florio
does, however, use the word "chopinos" in his English definition of
zoccoli.
Sources
References
chopine in German: Chopine