Clothing the Clergy

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.

Maureen C. Miller traces the ways in which clerical garb changed over the Middle Ages. Miller goes into detail about craft, artistry, and textiles and contributes to our understanding of the religious, social, and political meanings of clothing, past and present.

Maureen C. Miller is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of The Bishop's Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy and The Formation of a Medieval Church: Ecclesiastical Change in Verona, 950-1150, both from Cornell, and Power and the Holy in the Age of the Investiture Conflict: A Brief Documentary History.

Clothing the Clergy is a fascinating addition to the scholarship of both clothing and early medieval Christianity recommended for any academic library....Miller argues that the comparatively plain vestmentsof late antiquity gave way to a more ornate style as a reflection of new attitudes regarding episcopal power and clerical virtues.As bishops began to view themselves as co-rulers alongside kings and emperors, they embraced a style that mirrored their new status. Similarly, they hoped an ornate form of vestments would encourage virtues like chastity, wisdom, justice, and charity in their clergy, aspirations emphasized in new vesting prayers and the bestowal of vestments during ordination ceremonies.

--Hans C. Rasmussen "Catholic Library World"

[T]his remarkable book provides an original, stimulatng and valuable addition to the existing body of literature on Christian vestments.

--Lisa Monnas "The Burlington Magazine"

Some books are a joy to read. Other books are essential to read. This book is both.... Rarely do scholars integrate such different strands of study in creating their intellectual tapestry. Here there is the usual historicalwoof of text: tracts, chronicles, and laws. To these Miller adds the warp of liturgies, arts, and surviving garments. It is a delight to see these sources used with such skill to create a holistic pattern of the development of a distinctive clerical culture.

--Gary Macy "Speculum"

This wonderfully reserached and amply illustrated work plots the emergence of a distinct clerical garb between the ninth and twelfth century. Weaving together historical descriptions, councils, and ritual admonition with the testimony of material culture, Miller succesfully explores clothing as an expressive language (p. 9). The ideology behind the clothes provides important insight into the clergy's aspirational identity.

--Dyan Elliott "The Catholic Historical Review"