c. 1390–1433

Carmelite friar
Reformer

A Carmelite Preacher Satirist.

Thomas Conecte (or Connect) was born in Rennes, in Brittany in northwestern France in the 1390s. He joined the Carmelite order of friars and by 1428 was a popular preacher in Cambrai, Tournai, and Arras in the area of northeastern France bordering on what is now Belgium. Though he denounced gambling, his chief target of criticism was the fashion for very tall and elaborate female headdress. It is said that his sermons—which drew crowds as large as 20,000—were so effective that gamblers destroyed their dice and cards and women their tall headdresses immediately upon hearing his preaching. The famous eighteenth-century English essayist Joseph Addison had heard of, or read of, these sermons and described the women present at them in their tall headdresses "like a forest of cedars with their heads reaching the clouds." Soon caught up in...