Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity

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.