Horsemen, doctors and Protestants – The complex history of the doctoral hat

The hat model used by the Faculty of Philosophy became established in the 19th century. Black, the earliest and most widespread colour, echoes the mediaeval clerical garments mandated by the popes and Church Fathers. Additional faculty colours began to appear in Finland in the 1900s when doctoral conferment ceremonies at other faculties became more common and gradually developed into regular academic events. At the same time, these faculties adopted the hat model originally used by the Faculty of Philosophy, which had been standardised in the 1800s by Helsinki’s hatmakers. The oldest among the hatmakers still operating in Helsinki is E.R. Wahlman, in business since 1901.  

As late as the 18th century, neither the colour nor the model of the hat had become standardised. It is said that at the 1752 conferment ceremony of Uppsala University’s Faculty of Law, hats ranged in colour from sky blue and pearl grey to green and purple red, and could even feature a fur trim. The Uppsala Faculty of Medicine, led by Carl von Linné (Carl Linnaeus), was the first to abandon black, adopting a green hat in line with the practice in the Netherlands. In Finland, the Faculty of Medicine did not introduce green doctoral hats until its 1966 conferment ceremony. The following year, the Faculty of Theology followed suit by adopting purple doctoral hats. 

The hat model changed as well. The cap given to master’s graduates in mediaeval universities had become a square hat, which Protestant Northern Europe was keen to reject. During a period when any perceived sympathy for Catholicism or the Polish House of Vasa could be deemed suspicious – even as treasonous and an act of lèse-majesté – the square hat risked being taken for a Catholic emblem. Without a prescribed model for Protestant universities, hat shapes followed the fashion of the time. At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, the capotain hat, which originated in Spain, was in vogue in Protestant Germany and the Netherlands. 

During the 18th century, the 17th-century capotain hat developed into a lower-crowned style with upturned brims, the tricorne, which was popular among the Caroleans. In the late 18th century, King Gustav III of Sweden sought to introduce a national dress that would reduce his subjects’ reliance on costly imported materials and, at the same time, unify the appearance of his officials. The design drew inspiration from the presumed attire of Gustav Vasa’s 16th-century Dalecarlia troops. The tricorne was replaced by a black domed hat adorned with a feather. Professor Henrik Gabriel Porthan of the Royal Academy of Turku fretted over acquiring a uniform and hat in accordance with the new dress regulations ahead of a royal visit in 1802 until word arrived from Stockholm that Gustav IV Adolf had generously allowed the Academy’s less affluent professors to wear their old-style hats during the visit and the accompanying conferment festivities. 

After the Finnish War, Vice-Chancellor Jakob Tengström and Rector Matthias Calonius insisted that professors promptly obtain the uniforms prescribed for Russian universities, to be worn during imperial visits and journeys to St Petersburg. In 1817 Tsar Alexander I decreed a separate uniform for the Academy. It included a bicorne (a two-cornered hat modelled on the Russian uniform of the day), which is still worn today during conferment ceremonies by the University’s senior porter, whose duty is to present the doctoral hats and swords to the conferrer at the podium. However, outside official uniform rules, the round black silk top hat remained the traditional academic headwear, with the right to wear it granted at conferment ceremonies.  

Fashionable in late 18th-century England, the black top hat spread internationally during the Napoleonic Wars and became a symbol of the Victorian era. Its design has changed little since the early 19th century. While coloured hats have been introduced in other faculties and universities, the cylindrical gathered-silk model of the Faculty of Philosophy’s black hat has remained unchanged. In certain faculties, a lyre featuring the faculty symbol is positioned on the front centre of the ribbon around doctoral hats, mirroring the lyre emblem seen on Finnish student caps. 

Master’s and doctoral graduates returning from continental Europe brought medieval master’s hats to the North, but this model was very different from the style that eventually took hold in the Nordic academic world after the Reformation. When Gustav Vasa implemented the Reformation in 1527, most of the Catholic Church’s assets were seized by the Crown, collapsing the financial foundation of the fairly recently established Uppsala University and for Swedish higher education overall. Compounding the situation were the Vasa dynasty’s wars with neighbouring states and internal conflicts between the Vasa brothers during the 16th century. Universities were strongly ecclesiastical institutions, oriented chiefly towards clerical training, as the Church was the largest and most powerful official body in the kingdom. When religious and church-policy factions clashed in Sweden, no consensus could be reached on Uppsala University’s potential stance and doctrinal issues. John III of Sweden toyed with the idea of a return to Catholicism, while Charles IX, having seized power from John’s son Sigismund, refused to confirm the constitutions of Uppsala University, re-established in 1595, insisting on an inspection first. Relations between the University and the King remained tense and distrustful. Academic life in the Swedish Empire was fully revitalised only with Gustav II Adolf’s ascension to the throne in 1617, celebrated with a splendid coronation in Uppsala; the confirmation of the University’s new constitutions in the following decade; and the resolution of financial difficulties through prebendal farms and academic land endowments. 

For a long time, doctoral degrees were seldom conferred in Sweden. Those subjects of the Empire eager for advanced learning therefore continued their studies at universities in Northern Germany and the Netherlands, deemed suitable by the kings and the doctrinally strict Lutheran Church, and received their doctorates abroad. A fashionable new style of hat took off in the late 16th-century Netherlands: the high-crowned capotain, typically black and occasionally adorned with a large buckle or feather in the ribbon. Its round shape offered a secular, plain contrast to the square doctoral hat, a descendant of the old trade master’s hat still worn in the Catholic Church. The capotain became especially popular among Protestants, particularly Puritans, and is therefore known in the United States as the Pilgrim’s hat, after the Pilgrim Fathers who arrived on the Mayflower. Many Swedes who earned doctorates at Dutch universities – then leading centres of scholarship in Europe – brought Dutch-style hats back home. Meanwhile, the Netherlands was embroiled in its long struggle for independence from Spain, a conflict in which the Protestant–Catholic divide played an important role. The capotain was a fitting choice for Protestants, distinguishing its wearers from the square hats already used at universities in Catholic Europe. These square hats were descended from the mediaeval pileus quadratus, the model for today’s Anglo-Saxon mortarboards. Dutch-style capotains can be seen on clergy and young men in a depiction of the Swedish King John III’s funeral procession of 1592. 

Earlier versions of the capotain included the broad-brimmed headwear worn by pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, often marked with a scallop shell on the front band to show their pilgrimage to St James’ grave. In Spain, these hats were originally common in the Andalusia and Valencia regions along the Mediterranean, and closely resembled those worn by Armenian and Greek merchants across the Mediterranean. This ‘Eastern’ style appears, for instance, in 15th-century paintings of St Mark’s Square in Venice, worn by Eastern Christian merchants among the crowd. In the Greek world, the broad-brimmed petasos was already in use during antiquity. Likewise, the ancient Greek pileus spread across the Mediterranean cultural sphere and eventually became a distinctive headdress, particularly among Jewish merchants.  

Before the Reformation divided Catholic Europe, mediaeval doctoral and master’s graduates wore red hats. These began as simple round caps, sometimes with a long, hanging tip. By the late Middle Ages, the tip was folded over the crown, creating a square dome, which by the early 16th century became more rigid, supported by internal structures to maintain its shape. All university graduates received the same hat, as doctoral and master’s degrees were not yet clearly separated. The Latin magister meant a master (one who has acquired expertise), while doctor meant a learned person, and the degrees were often conferred together in Europe as magister ac doctor.  

In Finland too, at the early Royal Academy of Turku, master’s graduates received a red cap crowned with a laurel wreath. Because laurel trees grew far south of the Baltic Sea, the Turku Academy turned to wreaths made of common rue (Ruta graveolens) or metal, depending on the graduate’s resources: those less well-off had copper wreaths, while the affluent could afford golden laurels to adorn their hats. This tradition lives on at Swedish universities, where only doctors are conferred their degrees and receive both the hat and the wreath.  

In Sweden, the conferral of master’s degrees in Uppsala and Lund came to an end with the university reforms of the 1870s. Much earlier, in the 18th century, the hat had become the exclusive symbol of doctors, while master’s graduates made do with laurel wreaths. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, appeals to chancellors and kings by master’s graduates for a hat of their own went unheeded, as the hat was considered the emblem of higher degrees. King Gustav IV Adolf dismissed the doctor’s hat as a ridiculous item, fit only for the convicts of Suomenlinna. His reign ended with his overthrow following Sweden’s defeat in the Finnish War.  

The red cap of master’s graduates was modelled on the Phrygian cap, a long-standing symbol of free men. When worn by graduates, it signified their independence from their former ‘masters’ and recognised them as full members of their profession, equal to their peers. The Phrygian cap later came to symbolise liberty in France, first during a 17th-century revolt in Brittany and later, more famously, during the French Revolution of 1789. Today, it often crowns the head of Marianne, the personification of France, alongside a tricolour cockade.  

In ancient Rome, the Phrygian cap was bestowed by masters on slaves they chose to liberate, a sign that the wearer was now a free man, responsible for his own actions and no longer under his master’s control. Reliefs from Hippocrates’ era in Ionia and the Aegean islands show doctors wearing the pileus, a cone-shaped round woollen cap. This symbol made its way to Rome, as many doctors came to the Eternal City as enslaved people from the Greek East, brought there in the wake of the Roman legions’ military campaigns. The Romans also used the red Phrygian cap during Saturnalia, their mid-winter festival honouring the ancient harvest god Saturn. The celebration included lavish feasting and gift-giving, with the whole day taking on a carnival spirit. During Saturnalia, the roles of slave and master were symbolically reversed, much like on the day of the mock king, and masters served their slaves a meal. Saturnalia is a precursor to modern Christmas, and the Phrygian cap is an antecedent of the contemporary Santa hat; in Finnish folklore, the tonttu and nuuttipukki characters associated with the festive period never sported red hats.  

Saturnalia, celebrated during the darkest time of the year, coincided with festivities of the Persian-origin Cult of Mithra. Although the mythology of this male-only cult is poorly documented, extant sculptures and reliefs depict the hero Mithras wearing a red Phrygian cap while slaying a large bull. The Phrygian cap derives its name from Phrygia, an ancient kingdom in Asia Minor, located in the north-west of present-day Turkish Anatolia. The Phrygians, an Indo-European horse-riding people, arrived in Anatolia from the Eurasian steppes either via the Bosphorus and Dardanelles or, according to another theory, through mountain passes in the Caucasus. Their horsemen wore a distinctive red conical cap. On the Phrygian coast near Mount Ida, Cybele was worshipped as a form of the earth goddess, together with Attis, her annually dying and reborn consort, who, according to legend, castrated himself. As devotees of the cult adopted the Phrygian red cap, the iconic headgear eventually appeared in Rome, worn by these two deities. 

The long caps of the Phrygians and Persians originated with the Indo-European nomads of the Eurasian steppes, where horsemen wore the red headdress. In Persia, the cap, called a tiara, was gradually adorned with gold by the Medes and Persians as their wealth grew, eventually evolving into the crowns of kings of kings. A potential precursor to the red cap is the tall, gold-decorated red-and-yellow cone, supported by a rigid structure, worn by the Indo-Iranian nomads known as the Saka. Found in Kazakh graves, it is thought to have marked the shaman or chieftain of the tribe. The Saka, whom the Greeks called Scythians, appear on the walls of the Persian ruler Xerxes I’s tomb. One particular set of clothes for a man found in a kurgan near Issyk-Kul was so well preserved that it could be reconstructed, complete with its gold ornaments. This reconstruction has since travelled the world as the Golden Man of Kazakhstan. Tall conical hats of this type have appeared across Eurasia since the Bronze Age, the most famous being gold hats linked to a sun cult, discovered in Germany.  

Across its long and intricate history, the doctoral hat has come to symbolise freedom. Its lineage can be traced from the horsemen of the Eurasian steppes to the learned professions of the classical world, and later through merchants, artisans and pilgrims who brought it, by two separate routes, into the sphere of scholarship. Whoever dons the doctoral hat carries forward the ancient ideal of academic freedom, standing apart from the dominance of secular and religious authorities, serving only knowledge and truth: the very values to which master’s and doctoral graduands pledge themselves during the conferment ceremony.