ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how these two processes dressing and writing combine to create a locus for the social memory of monasticism. Using social memory theory, it argues that how monastic authors represented the wearing or production of clothing in their texts led the monks to participate in particular social memories when they engaged in the actions of dressing or making clothes. What the monk remembered when engaged in these actions, or when seeing correct monastic clothing as defined within that monastic system, allowed the monk to re-create and affirm his or her monastic identity. Part of these institutes and rules include clothing, which Cassian valorizes as a marker of monastic identity even more than Evagrius. Evagrius' link between clothing and teachings thus connects two different bodily practices: the act of dressing and the act of writing the instructions he has transmitted from (past) oral instruction to this text.
