Byzantine Dress: A Guide
Edited by Jennifer Ball
Routledge
ISBN: 9781032055220
This book presents eleven essays exploring clothing and fashion in the Byzantine Empire. Together, they reveal the diverse ways medieval people dressed—and how their garments often carried deep cultural, social, and symbolic significance.
Excerpt:
This book looks at dress beginning in the third century, beginning at the end of the Roman period and through the Byzantine Empire. Few items of dress survive from the period, with the notable exception of a large number of fragmentary garments found in burials in Egypt and Palmyra, making a history of Byzantine dress a difficult topic to tackle. Therefore, rather than presenting a garment-by-garment history of the dress of the Byzantine Empire, this book seeks to understand what Byzantine dress communicated directly, in images and written descriptions, based on our limited material evidence, in consort with pictorial and written sources. Due to the limited material evidence, Byzantine Dress: A Guide tackles its subject using current conceptual frameworks for thinking about the semiotics of dress, the Byzantine fashion system, and gender, to name a few approaches. Where we cannot get a chronological development of fashions, we instead can understand how Byzantines used and valued dress, and what it signaled to them whether in representation or in everyday life.
Who is this book for?
This book is an excellent resource for anyone interested in dress and clothing during the Middle Ages. It will also be valuable to those studying Byzantine society and culture, offering important insights into how fashion reflected and shaped daily life.
The first essay in this book – Byzantine Identity and Dress, by Maria G. Parani – is open access.
The Editor
Jennifer Ball is Professor of Early Christian and Byzantine Art at The City University of New York.
You can learn more about this book from the publisher’s website.
You can buy this book on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
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