ABSTRACT
The past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship on dress in the ancient world. These recent studies have established the extent to which Greece and Rome were vestimentary cultures, and they have demonstrated the critical role dress played in communicating individuals’ identities, status, and authority. Despite this emerging interest in ancient dress, little work has been done to understand religious aspects and uses of dress. This volume aims to fill this gap by examining a diverse range of religious sources, including literature, art, performance, coinage, economic markets, and memories. Employing theoretical frames from a range of disciplines, contributors to the volume demonstrate how dress developed as a topos within Judean and Christian rhetoric, symbolism, and performance from the first century BCE to the fifth century CE. Specifically, they demonstrate how religious meanings were entangled with other social logics, revealing the many layers of meaning attached to ancient dress, as well as the extent to which dress was implicated in numerous domains of ancient religious life.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|33 pages
Dress and the Social Body
chapter 2|16 pages
Coming Apart at the Seams
part 2|43 pages
Dress and Relationality
chapter 3|20 pages
“The Holy Habit and the Teachings of the Elders”
part 3|37 pages
Dress and Character Types
part 4|37 pages
Dress and Status Change
part 5|40 pages
Dress, Image, and Discourse
chapter 9|20 pages
Sizing up the Philosopher's Cloak
part 6|37 pages
Dress and Material Realities