After initial ambivalence about distinctive garb for its
ministers, early Christianity developed both liturgical garments
and visible markers of clerical status outside church. From the
ninth century, moreover, new converts to the faith beyond the Alps
developed a highly ornate style of liturgical attire; church
vestments were made of precious silks and decorated with
embroidered and woven ornament, often incorporating gold and
jewels. Making use of surviving medieval textiles and garments;
mosaics, frescoes, and manuscript illuminations; canon law;
liturgical sources; literary works; hagiography; theological
tracts; chronicles, letters, inventories of ecclesiastical
treasuries, and wills, Maureen C. Miller in Clothing the Clergy
traces the ways in which clerical garb changed over the Middle
Ages.
Miller s in-depth study of the material culture of church
vestments not only goes into detail about craft, artistry, and
textiles but also contributes in groundbreaking ways to our
understanding of the religious, social, and political meanings of
clothing, past and present. As a language of power, clerical
clothing was used extensively by eleventh-century reformers to mark
hierarchies, to cultivate female patrons, and to make radical new
claims for the status of the clergy. The medieval clerical culture
of clothing had enduring significance: its cultivation continued
within Catholicism and even some Protestant denominations and it
influenced the visual communication of respectability and power in
the modern Western world. Clothing the Clergy features seventy-nine
illustrations, including forty color photographs that put the rich
variety of church vestments on display."
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