ABSTRACT
In a collection of stories about the Egyptian desert fathers, a crocodile eats a bathing monastic. When an elder monk shouts to the crocodile, “Why did you eat the abba?,” the crocodile answers that it ate a secular person, not a monastic, and it nods to the habit, which is left on the shore. Its apology is that it mistook the habit for its owner. The moral of the story is that monastics should not appear in the nude, but the reptile also makes the interesting observation, that clothes can be mistaken for their wearers. Without clothes, the person is not the same. The present study is about the meanings and functions of ascetic and monastic clothes in Christian Egypt and how they interacted with their wearers, but it is also about the general significance of clothes. As a background for the study, the introduction presents the long history of clothes and their influence on humans as well as theoretical perspective and recent research.
