1st Edition

Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity

    320 Pages
    by Routledge

    328 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    Part 1 Dress and The Social Body  1. What to Wear: Women’s Adornment and Judean Identity in the Third Century Mishnah.  2. Coming Apart at the Seams: Cross-dressing, Masculinity, and the Social Body in Late Antiquity.  Part 2 Dress and Relationality  3. "The Holy Habit and the Teachings of the Elders": Clothing and Social Memory in Late Antique Monasticism.  4. Unraveling the Pallium Dispute between Gregory the Great and John of Ravenna.  Part 3 Dress and Character Types  5. The Unibrow That Never Was: Paul’s Appearance in the Acts of Paul and Thecla.  6. Adorning the Protagonist: The Use of Dress in the Book of Judith.  Part 4 Dress and Status Change  7. A Robe like Lightning: Clothing Changes and Identification in Joseph and Aseneth.
    8. Hairiness and Holiness in the Early Christian Desert.  Part 5 Dress, Image, and Discourse  9. Sizing up the Philosopher’s Cloak: Christian Verbal and Visual Representations of the Tribōn.  10. Imagining Judean Priestly Dress: The Berne Josephus and Judaea Capta Coinage.  Part 6 Dress and Material Realities  11. Putting on the Perfect Man: Clothing and Soteriology in the Gospel of Philip.  12. The Paradoxical Pearl: Signifying the Pearl East and West.

    Biography

    Kristi Upson-Saia is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles, USA.



    Carly Daniel-Hughes is Associate Professor of Religion at Concordia University, Canada.



    Alicia J. Batten is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo, Canada.

    "the book is an impressive one, demonstrating thoughtful approaches, both grounded in close textual analysis and successfully drawing upon a wide range of social theory that yields new perspectives on the question of what Judean and early Christian dress is for."

    - Ellen Swift, University of Kent