The Rhetoric of Dress and Adornment and the Construction of Identity in Early Christianity

Abstract

In the cultural landscape of the ancient Mediterranean, clothing was not only a covering for the body but also functioned as an ideological system that worked to construct and stratify categories of identity and social roles. On the one hand, garments themselves, such as the stola and the toga, materialized hierarchal categories of gender, class, and citizenship under the Roman Empire. On the other, women’s compliance with normative clothing practices—or lack thereof—served as a measure of broader social and moral decline for elite male writers. The early Christ movement emerged within this world, where clothing ideologies materialized and naturalized binaries of male and female, free and enslaved, citizen and foreigner. From the proclamation that the baptized have put on Christ to prescriptions regarding how women should dress in the household and assembly, early Christ followers took up cultural norms of dressing and adorning to fashion arguments about the social organization of the community and relations of power within it. This dissertation analyzes the rhetorics of dress and adornment—or arguments that use clothing practices to “think with”—embedded within citations of the baptismal formula and the household/domestic codes. These key examples highlight the ways in which early Christians used dress and adornment in arguments on both sides of debates about equality, piety, and social relationality within and outside of the community. Using a feminist rhetorical critical and materialist historical framework, this dissertation considers dressing and adorning at the intersection of metaphor and material practices and highlights how structures of power are variously shored up and contested through the deployment of clothing rhetorics. Rather than identifying the notion of being “clothed in Christ” as distinct from calls to cast aside luxurious garments in early Christian discourse, this dissertation understands both as embroiled in political and theological struggles for equality in early Christianity. In this way, clothing functioned as both garment and argument, and could be utilized at once to justify systems of subordination and to fuel movements for transformation.