“Garments of Salvation”:

Representations of Monastic
Clothing in Late Antiquity

REBECCA KRAWIEC

This article examines descriptions of the clothing of male and female monks
that abound in late antique monastic literature. These accounts sought to
create a monastic “uniform” that would set the boundaries and establish
the values of monastic life. Despite this attempt at standardization, I argue,
contradictions appeared between worn, drab clothes and shining garments as
the proper monastic attire, between the authority of male dress and female
dress, between acceptable and unacceptable nakedness. These incongruities
express the central tension of monasticism between sinful human and transcen-
dent angelic identity. Ancient authors were aware of this paradox and so too
possible misperceptions of monastic clothing and its meaning.

INTRODUCTION

A story in The Life of Shenoute recounts a time when an erring monk,

having been expelled from the monastery, is repenting in the desert.1 An

The first stages of the ideas in this article—and some portions of what appears
here—came from papers delivered at the AAR, Denver, CO in 2001 and at “Living
for Eternity: Monasticism in Egypt,” University of Minnesota, March 6–9, 2003. I
thank Philip Sellew for inviting me to give the latter paper. A Dean’s Summer Grant
awarded at Canisius College provided support during the revision process in summer
2006. John Dugan, David Brakke, and especially Andrew Jacobs read drafts and gave
crucial advice as I worked on this version. I also appreciate the suggestions from the
anonymous readers, which helped clarify my argument.
1. Nina Lubomierski has recently shown that this hagiography, attributed to Shen-
oute’s successor as head of the White Monastery, Besa, is quite later in composition.
Her work overturns scholarly acceptance of Besa’s authorship, which my argument
here does not rely on. See Nina Lubomierski, “Untersuchungen zur sog. Vita Sinuthii,”
(Ph.D diss., Heidelberg University, 2006).

Journal of Early Christian Studies 17:1, 125–150 © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press
126    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

“angel of the Lord” appears to him to determine whether the monk is

now willing to obey the rules of the monastery, and therefore can be for-
given and readmitted. During their conversation, the monk seems oblivi-
ous to the supernatural status of his interlocutor and instead appears to
believe he is a monk sent by Shenoute. This confusion, we are told, arises
from the angel’s appearance: “For as we understood it from [the monk],
the angel was wearing a monk’s habit (nouschma mmonacos) at the time
he appeared to the brother.”2 Likewise, on another occasion, “angels of
the Lord” appeared to some monks who were traveling with Shenoute in
order to relieve them of their intense hunger and thirst since their daily
meal had been delayed while Shenoute prayed with various townspeople.
These angels were also presumably wearing monastic dress since the monks
perceived them as “two young monks standing there with little pitchers
ready to give them water and whatever else they needed.”3 In these sto-
ries, clothing both marks and hides the characters’ dual identity: they are
angels appearing in the identifiable clothing of monks, those who are try-
ing to live the angelic life.
Monastic dress—like the monastic body itself—brings to the fore the
paradox between transcendent perfection and material imperfection in the
monastic life. Monks were like angels, yet human; they were to be beau-
tiful as a result of their vocation, yet drab in dress; they were authorita-
tive, yet humble; they were both male and female, and for the latter, they
were both holy, yet still women.4 Writers of portraits of monks seem to
have been most concerned with these paradoxes and, by extension, with
possible misperceptions of monastic clothing as the outward indicator of
the inner self.
The paradoxes apparent in descriptions of monastic clothing are intrigu-
ing because, at first glance, monastic dress would seem to be a stable marker
of unambiguous monastic identity. There is a shared generic portrayal of

2. Besa, Life of Shenoute 98–101, with quotation at 99 (J. Leipoldt, ed. with the
assistance of W. E. Crum, Sinuthii Archimandritae Vita et Opera Omnia, CSCO 41.
SCopte 1 [Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1906], 48–49). Translation from David Bell,
The Life of Shenoute by Besa, Cistercian Studies 73 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Pub-
lications, Inc., 1983), 71–72.
3. Besa, Life of Shenoute 76–79, with quotation at 78 (CSCO 41:38–39; trans.
Bell, Life of Shenoute, 64–65).
4. For the idea that “holy woman” was a contradiction in terms, see Patricia Cox
Miller, “Is there a Harlot in This Text? Hagiography and the Grotesque,” in Dale B.
Martin and Patricia Cox Miller, eds., The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gen-
der, Asceticism, and Historiography, 87–102 (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press,
2005), esp. 90 and 97.
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    127

the properly attired monk—a person, male or female, who has changed
into an identifiable garment, usually drab or dark, that becomes tattered
and worn over time as evidence of the success of the monk’s ascetic prac-
tices.5 Taking on this particular clothing, in the words of the Sayings of the
Desert Fathers, “makes” a person a monk.6 Likewise, in monastic Rules
from communal settings, proper monastic clothing signals membership,
not just within a monastery as a whole but even within the individual
houses that comprised that larger structure.7 The monk’s clothing is the
most obvious outward visible marker of identity, although general deco-
rum, facial appearance, and even hair can all contribute to that overall
portrait.8 Clothing is thus an important aspect of “the rhetoric of appear-
ance and lifestyle” that “might be integrated into the social category of
the ‘making’ of the early Christian ascetic ideal.”9

5. Throughout this article, I will use to the term “monk” to refer to all persons,
male or female, who are described as having withdrawn from everyday life to pur-
sue holiness, usually through ascetic practices, such as fasting, extensive prayer, and
sexual renunciation. For a more thorough discussion of monasticism as a movement
in early Christianity, see William Harmless, S.J., “Monasticism,” in Susan Ashbrook
Harvey and David Hunter, eds., Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008). I thank Andrew Jacobs for personal correspondence
on this point of terminology.
6. At several points in the alphabetical collection, monks either take on, or put
off, the “monastic habit” as a sign of taking or leaving this life. Abba Theodore,
for example, questions a monk about his monasticism by asking, “how long you
have worn the habit (tÚ sx∞ma)?”Apophthemata patrum Theodore of Pherme 2 (PG
65:188; Translation from Benedicta Ward, SLG, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers:
The Alphabetical Collection, Cistercian Studies 59 [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Pub-
lications, 1975], 78). In another, some monks ask Abba John the Cenobite, “John,
who clothed you in the habit (tÚ sx∞ma)? Who made you a monk (µ t¤w ¶pois° se
monaxÒn)?” Apophth. Patr. John the Cenobite 1 (PG 65:220: trans. Ward, Sayings,
96). See also the sayings of Epiphanius (Apophth. Patr. Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyr-
pus 4; PG 65:164), Poemon (Apophth. Patr. Poemon 11 and 182; PG 65:324–25 and
367), and Serapion (Apophth. Patr. Serapion 4; PG 65:416–17).
7. Andrew Crislip has an excellent summation of the use of clothing for monastic
identity in communal settings, including this point. See Andrew T. Crislip, From Mon-
astery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in
Late Antiquity (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 60–61. For the
purposes of this article, I am less interested in clothing regulations per se and more
in literary representations of proper monastic dress.
8. For an explanation of how descriptions of saints “assembled for the reader suf-
ficient facial details by which to decode and detect a virtuous soul” (145), see Georgia
Frank, The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 137–45 with clothing at 143. For
a treatment of female appearance, including but not limited to clothing, see Teresa
Shaw, “Askesis and the Appearance of Holiness,” JECS 6 (1998): 485–99.
9. Shaw, “Askesis,” 486.
128    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

In this article I examine descriptions of clothing in a variety of late

antique monastic writings, primarily from the East, that function to sig-
nal and to define a person’s identity as a monk. Rather than a set marker,
these narratives reveal a range of attitudes and ideas towards both monas-
tic clothing and monastic identity. Within these accounts, different opin-
ions over what constituted appropriate dress for monks indicate tensions
between emerging notions of ascetic values. Contradictions about monas-
tic clothing—its appearance and its symbolic meaning—reveal ancient
authors’ anxiety about possible transgressions of boundaries this new
“social rank” could create.10 Moreover, because the meaning of the cloth-
ing lies in how it was decoded, misunderstandings could lead to a mistaken
identity—something the writers needed to guard against.11
The texts that are the basis of my analysis—whether Egyptian or Syr-
ian monastic histories, sayings, or hagiographic lives—were particularly
influential among late antique depictions of the variety of the monastic
life. Their literary portraits of idealized behavior, including proper attire,
were meant to teach monks and non-monks how to recognize and inter-
pret monastic appearance. Although these descriptions emerge from var-
ied monastic settings, many contributed to a shared monastic discourse
in the late ancient Mediterranean and near east.12 By approaching these
sources not geographically but thematically, I inquire from varying angles
how monastic clothing signifies ascetic exaltation and humiliation, at times
asserting or subverting the authority of monastic identity.13 In addition, as

10. See Shaw, “Askesis,” 487, citing Cooper, Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Woman-
hood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 82–87.
11. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 170–72, lays out
how both practice and perception are part of habitus.
12. The most obvious example is the well-known fame of the Life of Antony but
David Brakke has also pointed out that many “Egyptian” monastic texts (History
of the Monks of Egypt; Sayings of the Desert Fathers) were edited and produced in
Palestine and Asia Minor (Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual
Combat in Early Christianity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006],
128–29). The sources for female monks are largely hagiographical and again tend to
be treated as a corpus (of “holy harlots” or respectable matrons). For a good over-
view of asceticism as a shared cultural phenomenon in late antiquity, but with local
variance, see Elizabeth A. Clark, Reading Renunciation: Asceticism and Scripture in
Early Christianity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 14–44.
13. It remains possible that different clothing customs and fashions might alter an
audience’s perception of a text’s description of monastic dress and such particular-
ity could be the focus of a future study. See, for example, Ellen Swift’s focus on the
fourth-century Upper Danube provinces (Ellen Swift, “Dress Accessories, Culture
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    129

we shall see throughout, the problem of the female monk highlights, but
by no means exhausts, the various contradictions explored and addressed
in the monastic habit.

FROM RAGS TO “HEAVENLY ROBE”:

MONASTIC CLOTHING’S RANGE OF MEANING

The link between clothing, the body, and religious identity is a topic that
has become vital for those who study both ancient and modern religion,
arising from the current interest in the “making” of people.14 Studies of
modern dress and religion have pointed to the importance of the emerg-
ing field of the “sociology of the body” to understand the use of dress
as a symbolic expression of identity within a social system.15 Overall,
dress is a “window through which we might look into a culture.”16 For
antiquity, rhetorical constructions in texts are the basis of analysis, rather
than the ethnographic fieldwork characteristic of sociology.17 Neverthe-
less, some of these same theories and insights are applicable, especially
the work of Pierre Bourdieu, whose “analysis of lifestyle, manners, and
tastes” and description of “habitus” shape understanding of the “rhetoric

and Identity in the Late Roman Period,” Antiquité Tardive 12 (2004): 217–22). My
concern here, however, is more on the various manipulations of a shared language
of clothing.
14. Shaw draws attention to this interest in scholarship in late ancient studies (Shaw,
“Askesis,” n. 1). An updated list would include at least David Brakke, Demons and
the Making of the Monk.
15. Linda B. Arthur, ed., Religion, Dress and the Body (Oxford: Berg, 1999),
1–3, gives an overview of the major theoreticians who influence current sociology of
the body (Mary Douglas, Erving Goffman, Michele Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and
Bryan Turner).
16. Arthur, ed. Religion, Dress and the Body, 2.
17. There are, of course, material remains of actual textiles from late antiquity,
especially in Egypt. See, for example, volume 12 (2004) of Antiquité Tardive which
is largely devoted to the archaeological study of clothing; of particular pertinence to
my topic is Lise Bender Jorgensen, “A Matter of Material: Changes in Textiles from
Roman Sites in Egypt’s Eastern Desert,” Antiquité Tardive 12 (2004): 87–99. While
my focus remains on rhetorical constructions in monastic texts, it is worth pointing
out that both texts and material remains provide evidence of how people wished to
be perceived, and not of actuality. Swift argues, “material culture is never simply
reflective of a particular status but can be used to construct that status . . . when
material culture is studied as a signifier of group identity, the examination is merely
of how various groups perceived themselves, and how they wanted to be perceived
by others” (“Dress Accessories,” 218). I thank the anonymous reader for bringing
this volume to my attention.
130    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

of ­virginity, with its seeming obsession with bodily details.”18 Scholars of

both antiquity and modernity note that Bourdieu’s explanation of the uses
of economic and cultural capital, and their transformation into symbolic
capital, helps explicate the religious use of dress that emphasizes symbolic
meaning over economic value.19 Clothing is cultural because it creates a
religious “brand” that can be “both claimed by the wearer and recog-
nized by the observer.”20 Yet it moves beyond being a cultural resource
to having symbolic value when it becomes part of a “system of symbolic
distinction represent[ing] the different levels of appropriating the religious
principle” of the group.21
Ancient writers, therefore, could control the values associated with
monasticism by defining appropriate monastic dress.22 Clothing appears
as such a “natural,” or in Bourdieu’s terms, “unconscious,” aspect of the
monk that it can be easily overlooked in the typical portrait of the holy
person in late antique literature.23 Clothing does not appear as frequently

18. Shaw, “Askesis,” 489. Habitus is particularly important in understanding the

creation of a normative description of monastic dress because “what agents judge as
‘reasonable’ or ‘unreasonable’ for people of their station in the social world stems
from habitus” (David Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997]), 103.
19. Both phrases—“cultural capital” and “symbolic capital”—are Bourdieu’s con-
cepts. As David Swartz describes it, “the idea of culture as capital insightfully calls
attention to the power dimension of cultural dispositions and resources” (Swartz,
Culture and Power, 80). Swartz here also explains the relationship between cultural
and other types of capital, such as social and economic, in Bourdieu’s theories (Swartz,
Culture and Power, 80–82) and later gives a description of cultural capital’s overall
meaning (Swartz, Culture and Power, 287–88). Bourdieu uses the term “symbolic
capital” to refer to other types of capital (such as economic or cultural) when those
capitals “gain a symbolic recognition that masks their material and interested basis”
(Swartz, Culture and Power, 92).
20. Shaw, “Askesis,” 489.
21. Barbara Goldman Carrel, “Hasidic Women’s Head Coverings: A Feminized
System of Hasidic Distinction,” in Arthur, ed. Religion, Dress and the Body, 163–79
at 173. See Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 180.
22. With regard to the role of dress in habitus, Bourdieu argues, “The interest
the different classes have in self-presentation, the attention they devote to it, their
awareness of the profits it gives and the investment of time, effort, sacrifice, and care
which they actually put into it are proportionate to the chances of material or sym-
bolic profit they can reasonably expect from it” (Bourdieu, Distinction, 202). Yet he
is careful not to present agents as creating a conscious strategy in doing so, as Swartz
notes (Culture and Power, 290).
23. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 78–79, defines the “unconscious”
as “the forgetting of history which history produces by incorporating the objective
structures it produces in the second natures of habitus.” Shaw, “Askesis,” 487, argues
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    131

as discussion of other bodily needs, especially food, or desires, especially

sexual; nor is it a means of temptation, as food and sexual desire often are.
Rather, clothing functions as it did in most antique literature—shedding
old garments, and identity, allowed for a new, or revealed a true (nude) self
underneath.24 By creating standards for religious dress, especially for the
monk, ancient authors could create a uniform that signified an accepted
set of values that carried with it an expected set of behaviors. As Bourdieu
argues about dress more generally, uniforms “abolish all trace of hetero-
dox taste” and “demand what is called tenure, in the sense of “dignity
of conduct and correctness of manners.”25 Ancient writers invested in
descriptions of the clothing of their monks because they could “profit” by
it; the more the presentation of the appropriately dressed monk became
standard, the more the authors successfully defined, and so regulated,
monastic identity.
At the same time, because clothing dresses the monastic body, it is also
part of the process of creating what Catherine Bell has termed the “ritual
body” which can fulfill “the social instinct for creating and manipulat-
ing contrasts.”26 The monk held a liminal status, both still human and of
the world, yet separate and alienated from it. This alienation implies a
higher status: as prophet, as holy, as angelic, and, for women, as bride of
Christ. The renunciant’s worn-out garments symbolized the success of the
ascetic way of life, that is, the distance between the monk and the everyday
world. Such clothing, therefore, for both male and female monks, indi-
cates paradoxically both the monks’ humility and their religious author-
ity. Their exalted identity, however, often demanded the introduction of

that ascetic texts have shared directives that are so ubiquitous as to be overlooked;
yet these “naturalize” the virgin’s actions and so “firm up the institutional contours”
of the ascetic lifestyle.
24. As Maud Gleason has argued (Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and
Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995],
155–56).
25. Bourdieu, Distinction, 206.
26. Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1992), 98. Scholars of late antiquity have recently used Bell’s theories about
the ritualized body to show how both monastic rules and clothing produce a ritu-
alized monastic body. For rules, see chapter 2, “The Ritualization of the Monastic
Body: Shenoute’s Rules” in Caroline T. Schroeder, Monastic Bodies: Discipline and
Salvation in Shenoute of Atripe (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2007). For the specific role of clothing as a “ritualized activity” that “helped shape
late antique Christians’ perception of their bodies and their world,” see Stephen J.
Davis, “Fashioning a Divine Body: Coptic Christology and Ritualized Dress,” HTR
98 (2005): 335–62, quotation at 336.
132    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

s­ hining, gleaming garments into these narratives, creating a tension with

the shabby monastic clothes. Clothing and its state, worn or shining bright,
signifies the dual status of the monk, both in terms of outward actions
and inner motivations.
This tension between sinful humanity and transcendent perfection,
shared by all monks, becomes further problematized by gender. Male cloth-
ing, as Lynda Coon has shown, is generally linked with power because it
symbolically connects the monk with biblical figures, especially Elijah.27
Since clothing also marks key moments in “salvation history”—from
being clothed with garments of skin, to the prophets, to the Incarnation,
and to the clothing of the afterlife—the clothing of monks can allude to
any, or all, of these referents, thus locating the individual male monk in
this tradition.28 Moreover, this biblical uniform has variations, at times
emphasizing the sheepskin mantle and at others worn garments. The list
of ascetic achievements, a staple of monastic literature, usually includes a
report of being dressed in tattered and worn clothing, often not enough
to protect from the hot sun of the desert day or the bitter cold at night.
Theodoret’s narratives of Syrian monks, for example, repeat the trope of
clothing as “mere rags” as part of Theodoret’s overall linking of the holy
monks to their biblical predecessors and underscoring their monastic com-
mitment.29 The ragged condition of monastic garments, however, could be

27. Lynda L. Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiq-
uity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 31. Coon also has a
chapter on “The Rhetorical Uses of Clothing in the Lives of Sacred Males” (52–70)
but her interests in that chapter are primarily western (as opposed to her discussion
of female hagiography). Her general theme of a link between biblical clothing and
hagiography (Chapter 2) has helped shape my arguments.
28. This layout of clothing as indicator of points in salvation history is from Sebas-
tian Brock, “Clothing Metaphors as a Means of Theological Expression in Syriac
Tradition,” in Typus, Symbol, Allegorie bei den ostilchen Vatern und ihren Paral-
lelen im Mittelalter. Internationales Kolloquium, Eichstatt 1981, ed. M. Schmidt
and C. F. Geyer; Eichstatter Beitrage, band 4, Abteilung Philosophie und Theologie
(Regensburg: Pustet, 1982), 11–38.
29. Examples from Theodoret’s Religious History include James (1.2; Pierre Canivet
and Alice Leroy-Molinghen, eds., Histoire des Moines de Syrie: Histoire Philothée, SC
234 and 257 [Paris: Cerf, 1977 and 1979],162); Symeon the Elder (6.9; SC 234:356–58);
Zeon (12.2; SC 234:460–62); and Maesymas (14.2; SC 257:10–12). Theodoret also
uses a tunic to discuss a monk’s need for singleness in ascetic practice, and resistance
to additions or distractions (Aphrahat [8.4; SC 234:380–82]). In another description,
Baradatus does not have worn clothes but rather covers his whole body in skins (Bara-
datus [27.3; SC 257:220]). For more on biblical allusions in the Religious History, see
Derek Krueger, “Typological Figuration in Theodoret of Cyrrhus’s Religious History
and the Art of Postbiblical Narrative,” JECS 5 (1997): 393–419.
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    133

misunderstood, as in the Sayings when a monk tries to have Abba Theo-

dore straighten his clothing to meet a visitor. The monk’s misinterpretation
of Theodore’s disheveled state as unacceptable rather than proper leads
to clarification—for the monk and the audience—when Abba Theodore
corrects him.30 Ancient authors used descriptions of male monastic gar-
ments to emphasize the monk’s authority, yet still had to contend with the
paradoxes that were part of that authority.
Female monastic clothing does not share the biblical trope of mantle of
authority, but it still represents ascetic discipline.31 The male authors of
female hagiographies approve of this discipline and commend either the
drabness, cheapness, or raggedness of the clothing in question. Time and
again, Jerome praises a particular woman for taking on the demands of
asceticism that is signified by her new, demure dress.32 An Egyptian monk
named Maria falls into sin and wears the “dress of the harlot” (habitu mer-
etricum) before she is rescued by her uncle; her return to the salvific life is
marked when she leaves the evil garments behind.33 For women the renun-
ciation of fine clothing marks the moment of their conversion, regardless
of whether it is the conversion of a respectable matron or a prostitute.34
In addition to this motif of women changing clothes when answering a
monastic vocation, clothing receives attentive and detailed explanation
at important narrative moments in several female ­hagiographies. In these

30. Apophth. Patr. Theodore of Pherme 28 (PG 65:193–5). The “habit” here is
a leb¤tvna.
31. Female monastic clothing, in its drabness, draws on other biblical images, as
Coon argues, Sacred Fictions, 29–44. In particular, she distinguishes between the author-
ity associated with male clothing and the “sin or women’s subordination” symbolic
in female clothing (31). For women, the “adoption of mourning dress is symbolic of
the inherent depravity of the female sex and the necessity of physical penance” (32).
While I agree with aspects of this distinction, I argue that both male and female cloth-
ing has a greater range of meaning than expressed by this dichotomy.
32. The trope of donning particular clothing when converting to asceticism appears
in several instances of Jerome’s description of female monks (Marcella, Paula the Elder
and the Younger, Eustochium, and Demetrias).
33. Vita Sanctae Mariae Meretricis, Cap. 6 uses this phrase but it is Abraham’s
perception of her dress (PL 73:651–60, at 655). Translation from Benedicta Ward,
S.L.G., Harlots of the Desert: A study of repentance in early monastic sources. Cis-
tercian Studies 106 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987), 92–101, at 96.
Meantime he is willing to “make use of hostile dress” (inimici habitu) to rescue her;
Ward, Harlots, 95, has “alien dress.” After her rescue, Abraham describes the dress she
wore, and money she earned, as evil in Cap. 10 (PL 73:658; Ward, Harlots, 99).
34. In addition to what clothes were worn, hagiographic images of the production
of cloth, through spinning and weaving, also signifies women’s devotion to asceticism
(Coon, Sacred Fictions, 41–44).
134    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

accounts, which are far more elaborate than those for male monks, authors
seek a variety of ways to balance the tension created by a woman who has
religious authority through her ascetic practices.

Monastic Clothing and Divine Authority

Clothing creates the authoritative status of male monks chiefly through
biblical allusion to Elijah, whose animal skin mantle (mhlvtÆ) becomes the
“natural” garment for male monks through their imitation of the Hebrew
prophet.35 Elijah’s own divinely-approved authority was manifest in this
garment. It both allowed him to perform miracles, thus creating a lineage
to Moses, and served as the object that transferred his authority to Elisha,
who repeats these miracles (1 Kgs 19.19–20; 2 Kgs 2.8–14). Hebrews also
used this clothing reference to craft a portrait of the prophet of old; late
antique writers then employed this biblical template as the model for the
monk, specifically one dressed in “skins of sheep and goats” (Heb 11.37–
38). The imitation of clothing linked the ascetical monk to his divinely
appointed predecessors, thus giving divine authority to his own life. John
Cassian, in his detailed explanations of the symbolism of monastic cloth-
ing, makes this connection clear. He notes in his overall description of
the monastic life that “the authority of Holy Scripture makes it clear that
those who in the Old Testament were responsible for the beginnings of
this profession—namely, Elijah and Elisha—went about dressed in this
way (hoc enim habitu).”36 He then explains in detail how each item of
clothing fulfills biblical commands, including the sheepskin.37 Moreover

35. This word, mhlvtÆ in Greek and melotis in Latin, is sometimes translated
“sheepskin,” sometimes “goatskin,” and sometimes just “mantle.” It needs to be
distinguished from flmãtion, which also gets translated “mantle” but which is not
animal skin, but cloth and is worn simply as an “outer garment” (LSJ 829b). On the
importance of Elijah in Egyptian literature of this time period, see David Frankfurter,
Elijah in Upper Egypt: The Apocalypse of Elijah and Early Egyptian Christianity
(Minneapolis, MN: Augsberg Fortress Press, 1993).
36. Cassian, Institutes 1.2. (Jean-Claude Guy, ed., Jean Cassien: institutions cenobi-
tiques, SC 109 [Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1965], 36). Translation from Boniface Ramsey,
John Cassian: The Institutes, ACW 58 (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), 21.
37. Cassian, Institutes 1.7 discusses the melotis and quotes the Hebrews passage
(SC 109:46–48). In addition, the commentary to the translation of Book I lays out
the ubiquity of these clothing allusions and meanings in monastic literature (Ramsey,
John Cassian, 29–33). Cassian’s description (in Latin) stems from living with Egyptian
monks under the care of Evagrius. Evagrius’s similar description (in Greek) of the alle-
gorical meanings of monastic dress, however, does not mention Elijah or the Hebrew
prophets. Instead he highlights the role of Christ. See the prologue of Evagrius, Pra-
tikos (Antoine Guillaumont, and Claire Guillamont, eds., Evagre le Pontique: Traite
Pratique, ou, le Moine, SC 171, vol. 2 [Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1971]). For a side by
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    135

it is this clothing, especially his belt (zona), that makes the “man of God”
recognizable as such to others.38
So too the History of the Monks in Egypt (HM) links the strictness of
the monastic life with clothing, specifically the sheepskin mantle (melo-
tas), again meant to evoke Elijah.39 Yet rather than a self-conscious cre-
ation of the monastic habit laden with symbolic meaning, as in Cassian,
the HM treats the clothing of monks as a natural, unquestioning part of
its description. Indeed, monastic clothing is so “unconscious” in this text
that even though there is portrait of the monk who is credited with hav-
ing invented the monastic habit, the clothing itself is not described.40 Both
texts thus control information in order to create a definition of the monk
through his clothing.41 Although the information is presented in opposite
ways—detailed versus offhand—the impression remains the same: a man
of God, separate from the rest of humanity, who is easily identified, and
thus categorized, by his clothing.
The meaning of Elijah’s mantle was especially useful in the crafting of
hagiographies that were meant in part to establish the authority both of
the subject (the monk) and the author. In the classic portrait of a soli-
tary monk, Athanasius’s Life of Antony, Elijah is once again declared the
role model for the monastic life.42 In the end, the dying Antony bestows
his monastic garments—two sheepskins (mhlvtØn), a “garment for lying

side comparison of the interpretation of clothing in these two texts, see William Harm-
less, S.J., Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), Table 12.3 on p. 381–83.
38. Cassian, Institutes 1.3 (SC 109:36–38; trans. Ramsey, John Cassian, 21).
39. Historia Monachorum 3: “These live a very strict life: they wear sheepskin
cloaks (mhlvtãw), eat with their faces veiled, and their heads bowed so that no one
should see his neighbor, and keep such a profound silence that you would think you
were in the desert” (Andre-Jean Festugiere, ed., Historia Monachorum in Aegypto:
Edition critique du texte grec et traduction annotee [Brussels: Société des Bollandistes,
1961], 39). Translation from The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Mona-
chorum in Aegypto, trans. Norman Russell, Cisterian Studies 34 (Kalamazoo, MI:
Cistercian Publications, 1980), 65.
40. tÚ monadikÚn ¶nduma HM 10.3 (Festugiere, Historia Monachorum, 76). Pater-
muthius is the monk in question.
41. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NJ:
Doubleday, 1959). He explains the role of control in creating “a kind of informa-
tion game—a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation,
and rediscovery” (8). Such an understanding of interaction and the impressions cre-
ated are further elucidated by Bourdieu’s notion of habitus as another aspect of this
interactive process.
42. V. Anton. 7 (G. J. M. Bartelink, ed., Athanase d’Alexandrie: Vie d’Antoine.
SC 400 [Paris: Cerf, 1994], 154).
136    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

on” (˘ ­ÍpestrvnnuÒmhn flmãtion), and a hairshirt (tÚ tr¤xinon ¶nduma)—

to ­Athanasius and Serapion.43 This moment has clearly been crafted by
Athanasius to support his own episcopal authority, as David Brakke has
argued. Moreover, the transfer of authority from monk to bishop is pos-
sible because of the symbolic link between Antony’s garments and ­Elijah’s.44
That is, the meaning that both author and reader assigns to the clothing
allows the transfer of “symbolic capital.”45 Likewise, in the Life of She­
noute, an angel tells Pcol, Shenoute’s uncle and founder of the White Mon-
astery (which Shenoute will later lead), to clothe the child Shenoute in a
mantle “for it is the mantle (schma) of Elijah.” This action, rather than
a vow, “makes” (aFaiF) Shenoute a monk. Moreover, this “angelic gar-
ment” (mpschma naggelikon) is explicitly linked to Shenoute’s extraor-
dinary feats of asceticism, which serve as the basis of his authority as
head of the monastery. Thus “the whole of his life and his intention were
like [those of] Elijah the Tishbite, the charioteer of Israel.”46 Like Elijah,
Shenoute’s clothing also carries with it divine powers. Shenoute gives his
“girdle” (mojH nvar) to a military leader who is fighting “barbarians,”
that is, non-Christians. When the governor forgets to carry it into battle,
he loses; when he remembers it, he wins.47
Female monks did not wear this sheepskin mantle so closely aligned
with Elijah, but they could dress in the rest of the male monastic outfit.48

43. V. Anton. 91.8–9 (SC 400:370; translation from Athanasius: The Life of Ant-
ony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. Robert C. Gregg [Mahway, NJ: Paulist Press,
1980], 97). It is noteworthy that each bishop receives a sheepskin (and surprising
that Antony has two), while they split the other garments: Athanasius gets the mantle
and Serapion the hairshirt.
44. David Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1998), 246–47.
45. Recalling Bourdieu’s terminology. The transfer in this text is literally of an
economic, material good (the clothing) but symbolically of authority; this symbolic
meaning only functions within Christian culture where the allusions and their inter-
pretations are already understood.
46. Besa, Life of Shenoute 8, 10 (CSCO 41:11; trans. Bell, Life of Shenoute, 44).
47. Two versions of this story appear, Life of Shenoute 106–8 and 137 (CSCO
41:51–52 and 60–61; trans. Bell, Life of Shenoute, 73–74 and 80).
48. Palladius reports that women in the Pachomian federation did not wear the
mantle (sometimes referred to in scholarship as a “hairshirt”), though it is unclear
whether they were not required, or not allowed. Palladius, Lausiac History 32 (where
the men’s mhlvtØn afige¤an efirgasm°nhn is described) and 33.1 (where the women have
the same way of life §ktÚw t∞w mhlvt∞w) (Cuthbert Butler, ed., The Lausiac History
of Palladius: A critical discussion together with notes on early Egyptian monasticism
[Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsnuchhandlung, 1967], 89 and 96). Coon points to
this aspect of the Pachomian community (without drawing attention to the difference
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    137

Some of these women, in their dress and asceticism, are mistaken for men;
one well-known example is Pelagia the harlot, who trades her “beautiful
if scanty” dress for masculine clothing, here the bishop’s tunic, when she
goes to live in the desert.49 Such tales, however, are not “entirely successful
in promoting a truly female model of holiness,” even in acceptable male
dress and so “have multiple transgressions of gender identities.”50 In con-
trast, Melania the Younger’s Life is marked by increasingly proper monas-
tic attire, including coarse clothing made from hair and even the “belt”
Cassian values for its holy signification of the “man of God” (above), all
of which are used to affirm explicitly her own holiness.51
Melania, raised in wealth and finery, begins her ascetic path in secret.
Only her aunt, whom Melania begs to remain silent, knows that she wears a
“coarse tunic” (flmãtion xondrÚn) under the clothing required by her ­gender

in sources) as an example of a ban against transvestitism in the Pachomian system

(Coon, Sacred Fictions, 39). The Pachomian sources, namely Jerome’s translation of
the rule, suggest that the monastic lives of both men and women were the same and
do not make a distinction for women (Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making
of Asceticism in Late Antiquity [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994], 290).
49. The description is Ward’s (Ward, Harlots, 59) but does not appear in the text
itself (PL 73:663–72; trans. Ward, Harlots, 66–75). For descriptions of clothing in
Pelagia’s Life, see Cap. 2 (PL 73:663–65); Cap. 10 describes how the devil uses beauti-
ful clothing and adornments (PL 73:668–69); and Cap. 12 has the account of Pelagia
donning male clothing, which are the bishop’s “tunic and breeches” (PL 73:669; trans.
Ward, Harlots, 73). For a discussion of Pelagia’s use of male dress, and the larger phe-
nomenon of female monks dressed as men, see John Anson, “The Female Transvestite
in Early Monasticism: The Origin and Development of a Motif,” Viator 5 (1974):
1–32. For a more recent study, especially from a literary perspective, see Stephen J.
Davis, “Crossed Texts, Crossed Sex: Intertextuality and Gender in Early Christian
Legends of Holy Women Disguised as Men,” JECS 10 (2002): 1–36, esp. 15–19.
50. Miller, “Is There a Harlot,” 92 and 93. Her analysis draws extensively on Coon,
who features Pelagia, including the role of her clothing, in her analysis of gender and
hagiography (Coon, Sacred Fictions, 77–84). In addition, Caroline Schroeder has
argued that the revelation of Pelagia’s female body while getting it ready for burial
“makes Pelagia’s gender performance even more complex. She is ‘male’ as a result of
certain bodily performance—namely, living as a desert anchorite. Yet she is ‘female’
as a result of another—lying naked before a male gaze. Within the text, both acts are
social performances; Pelagia’s asceticism was not less ‘real’ than her nakedness. Thus
her maleness was no less ‘real’ than her femaleness.” This point is in Schroeder’s dis-
sertation, but not in the book based on it; see Caroline T. Schroeder, “Disciplining
the Monastic Body: Asceticism, Ideology, and Gender in the Egyptian Monastery of
Shenoute of Atripe” (Ph.D Diss., Duke University, 2002), 91 n. 8.
51. The lives of both Melania and Mary (below) are difficult to date, as both Vir-
ginia Burrus and Patricia Cox Miller have argued. Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of
Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004). See Miller, “Is There a Harlot,” at 88, where she draws on Burrus.
138    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

and status as a leading Roman matron.52 When finally she convinces her
family and husband to allow her to embrace asceticism wholeheartedly,
she begins by renouncing fine clothing in order to train herself for harsher
ascetic practices; in this she is more successful than her husband, who at
first simply dresses in the Cicilian style before Melania’s prayers and encour-
agement push him to the “natural-colored” Antiochene garments which
“were worth one coin.”53 Here Melania’s actions regarding clothing are in
keeping with the hagiography’s general “gender reversal” that emphasizes
her predominance as the more ascetic partner in her marriage.54
Eventually Melania progresses to being able to wear a head-covering
(mofÒrion), garment (flmãtion), and hood (koukoÊllion) of haircloth
(tr¤xina), all the more noteworthy since she previously had such sensi-
tive skin just touching the thread of embroidery would cause a rash.55 In
addition, her willingness to be inappropriately dressed for “the world”
when meeting the empress underscores the renunciation made visible
in her clothing; they are declared to be “garments of salvation” (flmãtia
svthr¤ou).56 Although she did not wear the sheepskin mantle, Melania
wore a belt (z≈nh) from a “holy man” which she then used to perform
miracles.57 Melania thus had the ability to use her clothing as a male monk
might, but only because she took on male clothing and, by extension, its
divine authority.
Finally, after her death, Melania is buried in clothes “worthy of her holi-
ness,” all of which are typical monastic clothing: “the tunic (stixãrion)
of a certain saint, the veil (mofÒrion) of another servant of God, another

52. V. Mel. 4 (Denys Gorce, ed., Vie de Sainte Melanie: text grec, introduction,
traduction et notes, SC 90 [Paris: Cerf, 1962], 132–34). Translation from Elizabeth A.
Clark, Life of Melania the Younger (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984), 29.
53. V. Mel. 8 (SC 90:140–42; trans. Clark, Life, 31–32).
54. Coon, Sacred Fictions, 114–15. She also argues that Melania’s renunciation of
luxurious clothing is “a kind of universal repentance for her sex” with her veil and
hood serving “as punishments for her past life of luxury” (115). I am less certain
that Gerontius regards Melania as “punished” (more as victorious), but agree that
the gender aspect of luxury also shapes Gerontius’s presentation.
55. V. Mel. 31 (SC 90:186–88; trans. Clark, Life of Melania, 48). Several of the
terms Gerontius uses in Greek descriptions of Melania’s clothes parallel the Latin
of Cassian, Institutes 1, most significantly including the mofÒrion (compare “veil,
head-dress of women and priests”; LSJ 1085a); the leb¤tvna, which is described in
Jerome’s translation of the monastic Rule of Pachomius as an Egyptian garment with-
out sleeves; and, as noted, the z≈nh (see SC 90:186–87, n. 2–5).
56. V. Mel. 11 (SC 90:146; trans. Clark, Life of Melania, 34).
57. V. Mel. 61 (SC 90:248–50; trans. Clark, Life of Melania, 73).
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    139

garment without sleeves (lebÆtonow), the belt (z≈nh) of another which she
had worn while she was alive, and the hood (koukoÊllion) of another”;
a “hood made from the hair (koukoÊllion tr¤xinon) of another saint”
replaced a pillow and she had just a linen wrapping as a burial cloth. In
male hagiographies, these garments and their symbolic meanings support
the authority of the monk; for Melania, they are necessary to emphasize
her “holiness” in contrast to her gender. Indeed, Gerontius takes pains to
explain his detailed description: “I think it necessary for me to describe
them for the benefit of those who may read this account.” The “benefit”
here is the perception Gerontius is shaping, that Melania has taken on
(male) virtue: “for it was fitting that she be buried in the garments (tå
flmãtia) of those whose virtues she had acquired while she was living.”58
Melania is thus the most successful of these various (unnamed) saints,
bringing together all their virtues in her assortment of burial garments. She
is buried richly dressed, in the new terms of monasticism, having literally
accumulated the “symbolic capital” of others, just as she once controlled
much of the “economic capital” of the Roman world.

(Un)Dressed for Salvation

The holy authority of Elijah, and, by extension, the monks dressed like
him, stemmed in part from his separation from the rest of humanity. So
too other biblical allusions allowed authors to explore the tension created
by the monk’s liminal state, at times stressing the humanity of the monk,
and at others emphasizing his status as “saved.” In one account of the life
of Symeon the Stylite, the author uses the commonplace notion that the
body is the “garments of skin” referred to in Genesis to remind his audi-
ence of Symeon’s humanity, despite his ascetic achievements.59 Moreover,
the writer makes this reference in the context of Symeon’s needing to leave
the communal monastery because of his extreme ascetic actions, so that
the reminder of sameness takes on added weight.60 Yet, in Theodoret’s
version of Symeon’s hagiography, Theodoret uses the same expression of

58. V. Mel. 69 (SC 90:268–70; trans. Clark, Life of Melania, 81–82).

59. Antonius, Life of Symeon 8; ka‹ pãntvn toÊtvn tå ˜moia ±mf¤esmai. (Hans
Leitzmann, ed., Das Leben des Heiligen Symeon Stylites, Text und Untersuchung zur
Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 32.4 [Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1908]), 20–78, at 30.
Translation from Robert Doran, The Lives of Simeon Stylites, Cistercian Studies 112
(Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992), 90.
60. The ascetic actions that have led to Symeon’s departure are also expressed in
terms of clothing, see below.
140    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

skin as garments but in the context of Symeon’s holy body being a source
of blessing to other people; that is, in its extraordinariness, rather than its
ordinariness.61 This divergent usage of one metaphor reflects the struggle
ancient authors had in expressing the dual status of the monk.
The monastic garment itself could preview the end time in its association
with the wedding garment that is appropriate for the heavenly banquet.
Abba Dioscorus said, “If we wear our heavenly robe (tÚ oÈrãnion ¶nduma),
we shall not be found naked. But if we are found not wearing this garment,
what shall we do, brothers? We, even we also, shall hear the voice that says,
‘Cast them into outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.’
And brothers, there will be great shame in store for us, if, after having worn
this habit (sx∞ma) for so long, we are found in the hour of need not having
put on the wedding garment (tÚ ¶nduma toË gãmou).”62

Monastic clothing in this saying represents all the actions that make up the
monastic life. So too it signifies the salvation made possible by that life,
and as such it is a “heavenly robe.”63 Yet Abba Dioscorus simultaneously
reminds his audience that even for the monk salvation is not assured. The
“robe” can be lost so that, rather than dressed for salvation, one is found
naked, or condemned. In contrast, the female monk, and former harlot,
Mary, wore away her garments to the point of (acceptable) nakedness as
the means to her salvation.
This liminality between ordinary and exalted, between sinful and saved,
again becomes more complicated in the case of female monks since their
gender, and the sexuality inherent within it, emphasized their status as
sinful. Since this was particularly true of the “harlot” turned saint, these
female hagiographies have an acute tension that has recently been open
to multiple interpretations.64 The sexually promiscuous Mary has been
linked to biblical figures such as Eve and Mary Magadalene (whose

61. Theodoret, Religious History 26.12 (SC 257:184). For a discussion of the
relationships among the three versions of Symeon’s hagiography, see Susan Ashbrook
Harvey, “The Sense of a Stylite: Perspectives on Simeon the Elder,” VC 42 (1988):
376–94.
62. Apoph. Patr. Dioscorus 3 (PG 65:161; trans. Ward, Sayings, 55).
63. The trope of “shining robes” is not limited to monastic hagiography but also
appears in baptismal literature, as a representation of the shameless nakedness that
existed before the Fall and to which saved people will return. See Jonathan Z. Smith,
Map Is Not Territory: Studies in the History of Religion (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1978), 12.
64. Miller describes this text as having “interpretive oddities” which show the
struggle the author had with affirming a female as holy (“Is There a Harlot,” 93).
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    141

debut as a repentant prostitute coincides with the production of these

hagiographies);65 she can be used as a symbol of “universal salvation” to
teach male monks that even the most debased sinner is capable of living the
monastic life;66 in her solitude, she lives like both Elijah and Christ—but
not in her dress, as it turns out, and here she is similar to Melania who,
despite her superior status as matron and her hagiographer’s embrace of
her holiness, is also denied Elijah’s mantle.67 Mary’s most iconic represen-
tation—that she has worn out the clothes she was wearing when she fled
to the desert in shame, and now lives naked, blackened by the sun—also
has varying meaning: for Coon, it echoes both the bride in the Song of
Songs and the “apocalyptic Son of Man in Revelation”;68 for Miller, her
paradoxical state as holy woman is underscored by her “phantasmical”
state as clothed in nakedness;69 and for Burrus, Mary’s wildness allows
her to remain both harlot and holy.70 Moreover, all these interpretations
examine as well Mary’s relationship with Zossima, her male interlocu-
tor and hagiographer, especially the moments when she exerts authority
over him.71
The paradoxes of Mary’s biblically-situated body, at times clothed in
nakedness and at others still naked, even while clothed in Zossima’s male
monastic uniform of a “tattered cloak,” serves as the centerpiece for the
tensions between harlot and holy, sinful and saved, and between male
and female authority. When Zossima comes upon her during his own

65. Gail Corrington Streete has described Mary Magdalene’s transformation, by

the sixth century, into a “prototypical repentant ‘harlot saint’” (Streete, “Women as
Sources of Redemption and Knowledge,” in Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose
D’Angelo, eds., Women and Christian Origins [New York: Oxford University Press,
1999], 342).
66. Ward, Harlots, 26–34.
67. This shared similarity stands in contrast to those elements which Coon argues
make Mary’s hagiography an “inversion” of Melania’s (Coon, Sacred Fictions, 87
and 94).
68. Coon, Sacred Fictions, 93; used also by Miller, “Is There a Harlot,” 93–94,
who notes the multiple male Scriptural allusions in the text.
69. Miller, “Is There a Harlot,” 93.
70. Burrus more actively resists some of the competing interpretations, especially
the notion that that the holy harlot is “emblematic of the carnal love that must be
converted to ‘divine love’ in all human souls” (Burrus, Sex Lives, 130). Rather, schol-
ars must be willing to “surrender” to the “unabashed (possibly even unrepentant)
pleasure that inheres in the text” in order to see that the harlot is “already holy, and
still, unrepentantly, a ‘harlot’” (131).
71. Coon, Sacred Fictions, 88–93 examines the “gender reversals” in the narrative;
Miller, “Is There a Harlot,” 93–94.
142    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

­ anderings, he gives her his own tattered cloak with which she was able to
w
partially cover herself so that he might to listen to her account of her life.72
At this point, both subject and narrator of the hagiography use nakedness
to indicate the state of Mary’s self: when pressed for her lifestory, Mary
declares that since Zossima has seen her naked body, he can hear of her
sinful deeds.73 In contrast, once he witnesses the powers arising from her
asceticism, Zossima declares that Mary was “clothed in nakedness,” that
is, her nakedness no longer reveals her sinful female body but has come
to signify the extent and success of her ascetic endeavors.74 Whereas for
other female monks like Melania and Macrina (below), clothing itself
signifies their ascetic deeds, here Mary has had to wear away her clothing
to achieve this status. Because of her promiscuity, the symbolic capital of
“worn clothing” is insufficient because of the nature of her sinful deeds:
she had refused economic capital but engaged in sex for pure pleasure.75
Only nakedness, reversed from its usual shameful status, as indicator of
fallen humanity, to symbolic clothing, can counter the weight of her deeds;
or, in Bourdieu’s terms, since the deeds were “cheap” and “vulgar,” only
the rarest of commodities, a body clothed by nakedness, serves to cor-

72. Vita Mariae Egyptiae, Cap. 9 (PL 73:678). The Greek parallel is Cap. 2.12
(PG 87:3708). Ward, Harlots, 42 has “old and tattered cloak,” which is in the Greek
text (palaiÚn ka‹ §rrvgÚw flmãtion), but not the Latin. See Miller’s point that Mary’s
partial nakedness contributes to her seeming, but not complete, femininity (Miller,
“Is There a Harlot,” 93).
73. Vita Mariae Egyptiae, Cap. 12 (PL 73:679–80); Greek parallel is 2.17 (PG
87:3709). Also, in Vita Mariae Egyptiae, Cap. 9 (PL 73:677), she wants to protect
him from the “shame of my body (corporis turpitudinem).” See the Greek version
also (Vita Mariae Egyptiae, Cap. 2.12 [PG 87:3705]), where the Greek word for
“shame” echoes the shame evoked by Abba Dioscorus if monks would be found
lacking the wedding garment. This language, rather than Zossima’s acceptance and
even approval of her naked body, is more in keeping with ascetic portrayals. See, for
instance, Amun’s feelings about nakedness in Life of Antony. Here Athanasius tells
a story about Amun and Theodore crossing a river; he describes Amun’s feelings of
“disgrace and anxiety” about seeing his own naked body, even after he has taken
precautions that he and Theodore should not witness each other’s nakedness (VA
60.5–9) (SC 400:294–96; trans. Gregg, Athanasius, 76).
74. induta es nuditatem, Vita Mariae Egyptiae, Cap. 11 (PL 73:679; trans.
Ward, Harlots, 43–44). The Greek parallel is Cap. 2.16 (PG 87:3709), ≤mf¤eso tØn
gÊmnvsin.
75. Mary specifically notes that she refused payment for sex, even though she
needed to earn money through begging and spinning flax. The only material gain she
has from her licentiousness is gaining passage on a ship bound for the Holy Land.
See Miller, “Is There a Harlot,” 97, and Burrus, Sex Lives, 250–51.
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    143

rect them.76 In the end, Zossima departs, at Mary’s instruction, and later
returns to find her dead. Her burial clothes, like Melania’s, solidify the role
of clothing throughout: although buried in Zossima’s “torn cloak” her
body is described as still “naked as it had been before.”77 Like Melania,
Mary is buried in the clothes of (male) others, signifying male approval.
Yet the author simultaneously reminds the audience of her nakedness, a
result of her own ascetic deeds.
These tensions between naked and clothed, shamed and saved find
resolution, however, in two exceptional descriptions of monastic dress.
The Egyptian leader of the White Monastery, Shenoute, specifically warns
against a “worn garment” as being unsuitable for the “festival,” by which
he means the wedding banquet of Matt 22.11–13. He himself is a self-styled
prophet, dressed in appropriate garb that he can also tear in despair;78
and so too the monks under his care, here both men and women, are to
be dressed in the bright, shining garments of saints.79 Shenoute engages
in extensive biblical exegesis of passages related to clothing, making ref-
erence to clothing worn by Joseph, Jacob, Rebecca, and Jesus himself, as
well as to the various rules in Leviticus for priestly garments, in order to
show that proper monastic garments are, like Jesus’ in the tomb, “white
like snow” and, like the priests, “pure linen.”80 For Shenoute, the meta-
phorical meaning of clothing is straightforward: the monks’ ascetic deeds
were to lead to salvation, and so the monks should be dressed for salva-
tion. Anything other than clean, “resplendent” clothes was improper for
meeting God.

76. Bourdieu, Distinction, 176.

77. Vita Mariae Egyptiae, Cap. 27 (PL 73:689–90). The Greek parallel is Cap.
4.40 (PG 87:3725), where “torn cloak” (tÚ §r=hgnÊmenon flmat¤on) echoes precisely the
text’s earlier language. Trans. Ward, Harlots, 56, here slightly modified. In another
version of a harlot in the desert (which may be a parallel to Mary), when the male
monk departs he wants to leave the cloak, but the harlot refuses, claiming that he
will “bring [her] new clothing.” While the monk takes this task literally, and returns
with donated clothing, the reader realizes the “new clothing” refers to the harlot’s
salvation. See Ward, Harlots, 29–32, for a translation of this parallel.
78. Rebecca Krawiec, Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyp-
tian Monasticism in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 33
and 56–57.
79. For a discussion of the role of gender in Shenoute’s monasticism, see Krawiec,
Shenoute and the Women, chapter 5.
80. Dwight W. Young, “Pages from a Copy of Shenute’s Eighth Canon,” Orientalia
67 (1998): 64–84, at 75, and especially 81–83, which contain a translation of these
scripturally-based descriptions.
144    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Similarly, one particular Saying also differs from the norm of tattered
rags as a necessary part of “successful” monastic appearance. Abba Joseph
rebukes a monk who comes to synaxis wearing a “small, old head-­covering
with many stitches (polÊrrafon ka‹ mikrÚn mafÒrion palaiÒn)” and gives
him a “tunic (leb¤tvna) and whatever else he needed” so that the monk
can now look like an angel, as do the rest of the monks.81 This exception
prioritizes the link between proper monastic clothing and the monk’s sta-
tus as like an angel. Here the “mere rags” are discarded and the standard
monastic dress, the leb¤tvna, becomes the dress of angels. These moments
of inconsistency that erupt disturb a seemingly static portrayal of a prop-
erly dressed monk and so again reveal the anxiety about this new social
ranking as it was being set and shaped by ancient writers. The proper
“manner” of the monk was not yet so determined that the correct choice
of clothing was clear for all occasions.

Reveal and Conceal: Monastic Clothing and the Self

Biblical allusions for clothing were especially rich because of their mul-
tiple meanings and associations. Clothing was also, however, problematic
because it could hide the “inner person.” Once again, this linkage depends
on the relationship between clothing, the body, and the self: just as the
inner self could be manifest in the body, so too the body would transfer
its state, pure or sinful, to its clothing. Ancient authors were aware of
the uncertainty of whether clothing exposed the true self and strove to
emphasize the revelatory nature of clothing: that whatever was hidden,
good or bad, would be revealed in the nature of the clothing.82 In Anto-
nius’s version of Symeon’s Life, Symeon uses the monastically identifiable
“tunic of hair” (stixãrin tr¤xinon) to hide his ascetic practice of wearing a
rope so tightly bound to his flesh that a stinky, worm-filled wound festers.
It is not until his comrades attempt to pull off his garment (tÚ flmãtion),
fail because it is stuck to his flesh, and finally soak him in warm water
for a few days, that his devotion is revealed.83 This connection between
clothing, asceticism, and the self leads ultimately to clothing disclosing
the soul that has resulted from successful spiritual training. In one story

81. Apoph. Patr. Cronius 5 (PG 65:249). I have modified the translation in Ward,
Sayings, 116. Note that the Greek for “with many stitches” is the same phrase that
describes the garment that indicates a “beautiful soul” in HM, n. 84 below.
82. For falseness see Shaw, “Askesis,” 496; and see Jerome, ep. 22 (CSEL 54:143–
214) on the question specifically of clothing obscuring false identity.
83. Antonius, Life of Symeon 5, narrates his action and 8 describes his companions’
discovery (Leitzman, Leben, 24–30; trans. Doran, Lives, 88–89, 90).
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    145

from the HM, a priest comments to a monk dressed “in a ragged garment
with many stitches (=ãkow §ndedum°non polÊrrafon),” “You have a most
beautiful mantle (kãlliston flmãtion) for a soul, brother.”84 Such a com-
ment, where shabby dress leads to spiritual status, also echoes Bourdieu’s
observation that symbolic capital can only be accumulated at the expense
of economic.85
The inner self that clothing reveals is not always beautiful, however.
False monks could be exposed by their desire for extra clothing.86 So too,
in a series of instructions to both male and female monks, the monastic
leader Shenoute used the condition of his own garments to claim access to
knowledge of hidden deeds. His clothing is at first polluted by his diseased
skin, then rendered useless by moth damage, then replaced by a second
tunic he does not like, and finally replaced by a third acceptable garment.
All these situations allow Shenoute to use the damaged state of his own
garment to uncover the state of the community and so to bare sinful bod-
ies within it. In the first letter of instruction, he begins:
So listen, you who have love for him who is disheartened [Shenoute];
observe his grief as he utters this, “See then, Lord, I am distressed, I am
in torment within and my heart is in turmoil for I have indeed rebelled.”
For this illness has left me without strength, thanks to the severity of the
pain. As a result, I am averse to my garment (HoIte) or [my g]arments
([naH]oeite) touching [my b]ody.87

Here, as Dwight Young has noted, Shenoute’s concern is not merely for his
own health or even the cleanliness of his body and its coverings, but also
for the purity, attained by correct monastic practice, of those who lived
in the community.88 The pollution that the monks’ sins have created for
that community is evident to Shenoute in the state of his own body and
his aversion to his monastic clothing, the locator of his identity.
In a later letter addressing the same situation, Shenoute uses the image
of moth damage spreading throughout a garment to make a dual claim:
that he has divine access to concealed deeds, even as the monastic ­clothing

84. HM 12.7–8 (Festugiere, Historia Monachorum, 94–95). I have modified the

translation in Russell, Lives, 91.
85. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 180.
86. HM 2.12 (Festugiere, Historia Monachorum, 39).
87. Dwight W. Young, “Additional Fragments of Shenute’s Eighth Canon,” APF 44
(1998): 47–68, at 49. I have given a slight modification of his translation. For more
on the relationship between monastic practice and purity of the monastic body, see
Schroeder, Monastic Bodies, 11–15, 39–47 and 81–89.
88. Young, “Additional Fragments,” 50.
146    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

reveals them. He writes, “Who but God is the witness of what he said to
another, [namely], ‘Have you seen [how] a moth gets into chests where
garments are kept and destroys not only the fringes but also the middle
thereof?’”89 Again Young has pointed out Shenoute’s use of his “mutilated
robe to deplore the defiling deeds with which some in the community have
‘clothed themselves.’”90 For both male and female monks in the White
Monastery, clothing does not just signify monastic identity but also the
spiritual status of that self, either pure or polluted. The monks’ wrongful
behavior will also be exposed in their garments: “Your knees shall not
cover you nor shall you clothe yourselves with your deeds. Or, if you have
already clothed yourselves with them, on you it is as garments stained with
blood.”91 Shenoute here reverses the role of clothing in texts that present
positive portrayals of “successful” monks; rather than revealing perfection,
clothing in the White Monastery reveals the sins that cannot be hidden.
The burial clothing of another famous, and once wealthy, monk,
Macrina, also participates in revelation and concealment by invoking the
tension between shabby and shining garments found in Shenoute’s biblical
exegsis and the Sayings of male monks, but here set in female terms.92 Dress
is, in her Life, a signifier of monastic perfection, but it is unclear whether
this perfection should be symbolically presented by having Macrina appear
as a splendid bride, or a properly drab monk.93 Moreover, her brother
Gregory is the one who manages the perception of Macrina through her
clothing both as author of her hagiography and as the person who, along
with two women who lived in Macrina’s ascetic household, prepares her

89. Young, “Pages,” 75.

90. Young, “Pages,” 75.
91. Young, “Pages,” 84.
92. Philip Rousseau has recently cautioned against using the institutional language
of the monastery to describe Macrina’s living arrangement (Philip Rousseau, “The
Pious Household and the Virgin Chorus: Reflections on Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of
Macrina,” JECS 13 (2005): 165–86). While I agree that Macrina’s household does
not necessarily have the regulated nature of a communal monastery, the term “monk”
remains accurate for Macrina, since it has a wider range of meaning than simply liv-
ing in a communal monastery.
93. Likewise, Macrina’s other brother, Basil, declares that women who lived under
his monastic Rule should wear what was “decent and befitting” for women. See Dan-
iel F. Stramara, Jr. “Double Monasticism in the Greek East, Fourth through Eighth
Centuries,” JECS 6 (1998): 269–312, at 292, for a description of importance of gen-
der appropriate dress in Basil’s monasticism. The rule Stramara cites is Rule 210 of
SR (PG 31:982–83). Translation from M. Monica Wagner, CSC, Saint Basil: Ascetical
Works, FC 9 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1950), 307.
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    147

body for her funeral.94 Now that she is dead, Gregory determines that it
is “above reproach to put brighter ornament on the body and to adorn
with brilliant fine linen that pure and spotless flesh.”95 In allowing such
ornamentation only in death, Gregory makes clear its unacceptability in
the life Macrina had led. Then it might have appeared arrogant to dress
as a “bride of Christ,” to claim an angelic status for oneself. Moreover,
his helper Vetiana is only willing to allow its acceptability now if Macrina
had given consent (prior to her death), to which another monk, Lampa-
dium, bears witness. A problem arises, however, in that Macrina did not
have “brighter ornament” or “brilliant fine linen” available, nor did the
monastery as a whole (a point Gregory, the non-monastic visitor, seems
to have missed when he asks whether any appropriate clothing can be
found in the storage closets). Lampadium, in explaining the situation to
Gregory, uses language that reflects the usual role of clothing for monas-
tic women: she specifically points to Macrina’s “dress . . . the veil of her
head, her worn-out sandals” as evidence that Macrina was a successful
monk.96 Like other monks, Macrina’s ascetic deeds created her proper
clothing: “the pure life was what she looked to as ornament for her, this
was the decoration of her life and the shroud of death.”97
Yet even within this situation, clothing hides as well as reveals. The
anxiety is not about possibilities of “falseness” but instead that the success
being touted by her dress could be misunderstood. Macrina’s clothing for
her funeral becomes controversial when the “deaconness” (Lampadium)
determines that “it was not suitable that she should be seen by the eyes
of the virgins prepared as a bride.”98 The inappropriateness lies not with
Macrina, since her monastic discipline allowed her to be dressed in this
fashion. Rather the danger lay in the possible misunderstanding on the
part of her followers, and by extension some readers. They might think
her current funeral attire was somehow necessary: “that this holy beauty
should not be made brilliant by the imported ornament of dress.”99 The

94. Elm also examines the role of clothing in Macrina’s monasticism, though from
a more historical perspective than from a rhetorical one (Elm, Virgins, 98–99).
95. Vita Macrinae 28.10–13 (Pierre Maraval, ed., Grégoire de Nysse: Vie de
Sainte Macrine, SC 178 [Paris: Cerf, 1971], 234). All translations for this section are
modified from Virginia Woods Callahan, Gregory of Nyssa: Ascetical Works, FC 58
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1967), here 183.
96. Vita Macrinae 29.15–16 (SC 178:236; trans. Callahan, Ascetical Works,
184).
97. Vita Macrinae 29.6–8 (SC 178:236; trans. Callahan, Ascetical Works, 184).
98. Vita Macrinae 32.2–4 (SC 178:246; trans. Callahan, Ascetical Works, 186).
99. Vita Macrinae 32.4–7 (SC 178:246; trans. Callahan, Ascetical Works, 186).
148    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

solution lay in a near-reversal of the initial use of clothing in the Life of

Melania the Younger. Whereas for Melania, opulent clothing hid a course
tunic, here a “dark cloak” which had belonged to Macrina’s mother covers
Macrina’s bridal dress. Macrina’s two identities, bride of Christ and suc-
cessful monk, are simultaneously present in her funeral clothing because
she has two layers of clothing. Here, as with Symeon, the true ­achievements
of the monk are “hidden,” except to a few select characters and, of course,
the audience. Hiding Macrina’s inner self does not create fear and decep-
tion; rather it is necessary in order to heighten her extraordinary duality
and to balance the tension inherent in it.

What to Do with a Problem like Ecdicia?

Implicit in the above examples of female monks is that female agency
heightens the paradoxes of the monastic life; for each female hagiog-
raphy, there is a male author carefully managing the presentation of an
acceptable, if still paradoxical, “holy woman.” On at least one occasion,
however, a female monk established her identity through her clothing, but
in a manner criticized by a male authority, here Augustine. In his letter
to Ecdicia, which we might term an “antihagiography” for his chastise-
ment of her determination to pursue her ascetic inclinations against her
husband’s wishes, Augustine presents Ecdicia’s change of dress differently
than its general usage in other late antique sources. While it again signals
her increased commitment to an ascetic life, it is also the proverbial straw
that breaks the camel’s back of her marriage; enforced celibacy did not
lead her husband to adultery, but Ecdicia’s shedding of “matron’s garb”
in favor of monastic dress does. Ecdicia’s actions upset the careful balance
of female monasticism, of allowing the “holy woman.” Her agency leads
to a display of anxiety that a woman could shape her own identity by a
change of dress, an act undertaken without consent or approval.
In response, Augustine emphasizes that, although celibate, Ecdicia is still
her husband’s wife and therefore still subject to her husband’s authority,
even with regards to her clothing: “Therefore, you ought to have done
nothing concerning your clothes and nothing concerning your gold or
silver or any money, or any other of your earthly possessions, without
his authority, lest you scandalize the man who had vowed to God, along
with you, greater things and he had abstained, with self-restraint, from
that which he was able by legal right to exact from your flesh.”100 Augus-

100. ep. 262.4 (CSEL 57:624). My translations are all modified from J. H. Baxer,
St. Augustine: Select Letters, LCL 10 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1930), 505–7.
 KRAWIEC/“GARMENTS OF SALVATION”    149

tine then makes clear that there is no religious basis for her actions: “If
[in these other matters] . . . you and your faithful husband ought to have
shared advice . . . and you ought not to reject his wishes, how much more
ought you to change nothing, or to usurp anything, concerning your
clothes (habitu) and your dress (vestitu)—a thing about which we have
read no divine orders.”101 Augustine concedes that 1 Tim 2.9 does discuss
women’s apparel, but those “divine orders” pertain only to adornment for
“empty show.” The standard matron’s cloak (habitus matronalis) is not,
for Augustine, included: it may “befit faithful [i.e., Christian] wives with
their religious observance intact.”102 Ecdicia, however, is wearing the gar-
ments associated with widows, much to her (living) husband’s dismay.
Augustine concludes that the quarrel that resulted over clothing was
one that did more harm than any good Ecdicia gained from a change in
clothing: “For what is more absurd than that a wife lords it over her hus-
band about a lowly garment, when it could have been more useful for you
to obey him with shining deeds than to fight against with him with your
dark clothes?”103 Augustine uses both “shining” and “drab” but criticizes
the “drab” clothes for not being symbolic of shining deeds. Moreover, he
also calls on the notion of an “inner self,” but here one not indicated by
outer garments: “even if you were compelled . . . you would be able to
have a humble heart beneath your proud finery.”104 Ecdicia’s need to hide
her ascetic self, like Melania’s, stems from her dual status as monk and
wife, but she is denied duality of dress. Her soul is best served not by a
metaphorical beautiful mantle, but an actual one, by worldly standards.

CONCLUSION

Over and over again, monks, male and female, appear in texts dressed
appropriately, as defined by the author. What seems at first glance a stable
marker, an off-hand reference to the proper attire associated with renuncia-
tion, shifts as these writers stress different aspects of the identity: alienation
from the world, angelic status, widowhood, bride of Christ, and, above

101. ep. 262.9 (CSEL 57:628; trans. Baxter, Augustine, 513–15). By “faithful,”
Augustine means “Christian,” not sexual fidelity, since, of course, Ecdicia’s husband
has committed adultery.
102. ep. 262.9 (CSEL 57:628; trans. Baxter, Augustine, 515).
103. ep. 262.9 (CSEL 57:629; trans. Baxter, Augustine, 515).
104. ep. 262.10 (CSEL 57:629; trans. Baxter, Augustine, 517), though keeping in
mind that Ecdicia’s husband is not insisting on unbecoming dress, just the matron’s
dress, which Augustine has already declared acceptable.
150    JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

all, an inner person who may, or may not, be discernible by outer appear-
ance. Perhaps no moment is more surprising then when Zossima, seeing
the naked Mary in the desert, runs after her, rather than away, despite her
unclothed state. That image—a male monk in a tattered garment chasing
through the desert a naked woman whose body has been blackened by the
sun—pulls together the various meanings and associations with monas-
tic clothing. What seems like most improper behavior reveals itself as the
means of both Mary’s and Zossima’s salvation, rendering it proper. Like-
wise, the various forms of dress can all be made appropriate through the
author’s control of its perception, and so of its meaning. Shabby and worn
or gleaming bright, even naked, these monks are dressed for salvation.

Rebecca Krawiec is Associate Professor of Religious Studies

and Theology at Canisius College