The rosenhut belongs to the family of named still-head shapes that spread through German-language distilling practice at the turn of the sixteenth century, documented in Hieronymus Brunschwig's Liber de arte distillandi, first printed in Strasbourg in 1500 and reprinted with an expanded edition in 1512. Brunschwig's book was the first printed manual devoted entirely to distillation, written for apothecaries and surgeons rather than only alchemists, and its illustrations of named apparatus, the rosenhut among them, are the earliest clear documentation this instrument has.
The name, "rose hat" in German, points directly at its best-known use, distilling rosewater and other perfumed botanical waters, where a cool, protected condensing surface mattered more than raw speed. The rosenhut did not carry its name forward into later chemistry the way the retort or the pelican did, and it dropped out of use as still-head design shifted toward separate water-cooled condensers that did not depend on height and ambient air alone to stay cool. Its underlying principle, however, that a taller condensing path improves separation of a mixture's components, is exactly the idea behind the fractionating column used in laboratory and industrial distillation today, even though no direct line of descent connects the two by name.