chasublen.

Etymology: Middle English chesible was < Old French chesible (compare medieval Latin cassibula); the current form, which has taken its place since 1700, corresponds to modern French chasuble (casuble 13th cent. in Littré), and to the medieval Latin casubula (cassubula, casubla, etc.); these go back respectively to late Latin types *casipula, *casupula (in Italian casipola and casupola little house, poor cottage, cot, hut), popular forms used instead of the literary Latin casula, diminutive of casa ‘cottage, house’; meaning originally ‘little house, cot’, but also, already in Augustine (c400), the ordinary name of an outer garment, a large round sleeveless cloak with a hood, according to Isidore ( xix. xxi. 17) ‘vestis cucullata, dicta per diminutionem a casa, quod totum hominem tegat, quasi minor casa’.(Casipula < casa has been compared to manipulus ‘little band’ < manus. The literary ˈcasula appears to have left no representative in modern Romanic languages; the Old French chasule, casule (casure), Spanish casulla, point to the secondary diminutive casulula (see Du Cange). As an article of dress, casula appears to have been a popular or provincial name for the paenula of classical Latin, a garment consisting of a circular piece of cloth with a hole in the centre for the head, worn in cold or rainy weather, by peasants in the fields, travellers, etc.; as the most ordinary of garments, it was worn by the monks, and by the Council of Ratisbon, 742, was decreed to be the proper dress of the clergy out of doors. For the supervestment worn in sacerdotal offices, the ordinary name from 5th to 8th cent. was planeta; ‘the earliest undoubted instance of casula so used (in Sacramentary of St. Gregory) dates from the 9th cent., or possibly the 8th’ ( Dict. Chr. Ant.). But it at length supplanted the earlier names planeta, amphibolum, infula; and in English chasuble has this sense only.