Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity - Hardcover

9781472422767: Dressing Judeans and Christians in Antiquity

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1472422767 ISBN 13: 9781472422767

Publisher: Routledge, 2014

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.

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About the Author:

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.

Review:

"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

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