This book examines the dress and personal appearance of members of the middle and lower classes in the eastern Mediterranean region during the 4th to 8th centuries. Written, art historical and archaeological evidence is assessed with a view to understanding the way that cloth and clothing was made, embellished, cared for and recycled during this period. Beginning with an overview of current research on Roman dress, the book looks in detail at the use of apotropaic and amuletic symbols and devices on clothing before examining sewing and making methods, the textile industry and the second-hand clothing trade. The final chapter includes detailed information on the making and modelling of exact replicas based on extant garments.

This volume aims to understand religious aspects of dress in the ancient world by examining a diverse range of religious sources, including literature, art, performance, coinage, economic markets, and memories. Contributors demonstrate how dress developed as a topos within Judean and Christian rhetoric, symbolism, and performance, and show 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 religious life.

Presents a wide ranging examination of the social roles of dressed bodies in ancient contexts, texts, and images.

A detailed, finely researched and profusely illustrated history of clothing and fashion in the Roman Empire.

This volume presents the results of a 2017 workshop at the Centre for Textile Research (CTR), University of Copenhagen, an event within the framework of the MONTEX project-including support from a Marie Sk

Insights from anthropology, religious studies, biblical studies, sociology, classics, and Jewish studies are here combined to provide a cutting-edge guide to dress and religion in the Greco-Roman World and the Mediterranean basin. Clothing, jewellery, cosmetics, and hairstyles are among the many aspects examined to show the variety of functions of dress in communication and in both establishing and defending identity. The volume begins by reviewing how scholars in the fields of classics, anthropology, religious studies, and sociology examine dress. The second section then looks at materials, including depictions of clothing in sculpture and in Egyptian mummy portraits. The third (and largest) part of the book then examines dress in specific contexts, beginning with Greece and Rome and going on to Jewish and Christian dress, with a specific focus on the intersection between dress, clothing and religion. By combining essays from over twenty scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, the book provides a unique overview of different approaches to and contexts of dress in one volume, leading to a greater understanding of dress both within ancient societies and in the contemporary world.

Twenty chapters present the range of current research into the study of textiles and dress in classical antiquity, stressing the need for cross and inter-disciplinarity study in order to gain the fullest picture of surviving material. Issues addressed include: the importance of studying textiles to understand economy and landscape in the past; different types of embellishments of dress from weaving techniques to the (late introduction) of embroidery; the close links between the language of ancient mathematics and weaving; the relationships of iconography to the realities of clothed bodies including a paper on the ground breaking research on the polychromy of ancient statuary; dye recipes and methods of analysis; case studies of garments in Spanish, Viennese and Greek collections which discuss methods of analysis and conservation; analyses of textile tools from across the Mediterranean; discussions of trade and ethnicity to the workshop relations in Roman fulleries. Multiple aspects of the production of textiles and the social meaning of dress are included here to offer the reader an up-to-date account of the state of current research. The volume opens up the range of questions that can now be answered when looking at fragments of textiles and examining written and iconographic images of dressed individuals in a range of media. The volume is part of a pair together with Prehistoric, Ancient Near Eastern and Aegean Textiles and Dress: an interdisciplinary anthology edited by Mary Harlow, Cécile Michel and Marie-Louise Nosch