Each field knows its heroes: those individuals who, by their scholarship, pedagogy, and mentorship, have molded a discipline, precipitated its flourishing, and are honored accordingly with a Festschrift. Even by the standards of the genre, however, the recipient of this volume, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, is rara avis: a scholar whose labors have shaped not just one field but several.

The breadth and depth of her influence on the disciplines of late antiquity, Syriac studies, hymnography, and other cognate realms are reflected well in the diversity of voices contributing to Garb of Being. Their scope ranges from the deployment of patristic sources in modern writings to third-century expositions of the Gospels, and from fourth-century ascetic practices to the role of Coptic and Syriac digital humanities projects in and as heritage preservation. Their unifying conceit, as the title suggests, is that of attire, whether in the guise of the garments by which Christians knew and made themselves known in the full complexity of their social existence or in that of the body, itself a garment, in its individual and communal iterations.

Contributions fall into three categories: “Making Bodies”; “Performing Bodies”; and “Scripting Bodies.” Their uniformly high quality makes it tempting to address each essay individually—an approach that the necessary brevity of this review renders unsatisfying. In lieu thereof, I here highlight a few representative works that stand, pars pro toto, for the volume's variety in substance and methodology as well as for its appeal.

At the outset of the collection, Frances Young's essay, “Body and Soul: Union in Creation, Reunion at Resurrection,” sets the scene for the volume by considering human embodiment in its most expansive context: that of creation and resurrection. Her work here invites readers into the scholarly context of Harvey's graduate studies at the University of Birmingham by offering a “fresh consideration” of some of Young's most influential contributions to the study of early Christian anthropology (32). Young takes readers on a tour de force across the first five hundred years of Christian thought; from Athenagoras to the Coptic Life of Abba Aphou, and the Nag Hammadi writings to Cappadocians, the essay examines more than a dozen witnesses to early Christians’ efforts to arbitrate between Neoplatonic dualism and an integration of soul and body as constitutive of the human person. The latter, Young suggests, in fact emerges as the dominant paradigm as early as the second century, owing in large part to the parallel authors like Athenagoras drew between creation and resurrection. These twin movements underlie the most sophisticated expressions of anthropology in the works of Nemesius and Augustine—the product of a contested but, in this reading, nevertheless discernable trajectory.

Young leaves open a number of tantalizing avenues for exploration—including both ancient and modern medical perspectives on the soul—while mapping the philosophical and theological loci among which move the volume's later contributions. A number of these, including Rebecca Stephens Falcasantos's, Andrew S. Jacobs's, Jeanne-Nicole Mellon Saint-Laurent's, and Sebastian Brock's, explore territory perhaps most familiar to students of Harvey's work—namely, that of Syriac Christian asceticism. Rebecca Krawiec's essay, “A Question of Character: The ‘Labor of Composition’ as ‘Preventative Medicine’ in Theodoret of Cyrrhus's Religious History,” for example, attends to the bodily particularities of Theodoret's Religious History and its apparently relentlessly undifferentiated phalanx of ascetic heroes. Despite their sameness in holiness, however, these monks here appear as distinctive characters, identifiable by time and place as well as their relations with human and non-human interlocutors and their bodily regimes. These serve, Krawiec suggests, mimetic as well as symbiotic functions: pointing beyond themselves to a larger whole while simultaneously modeling the practicalities of askesis for their monastic audiences. Their bodily practices, including their consumption and abstention from food, thus function as monastic analogues of Galen's case studies, designed to present readers with aspirational and emulable prototypes. They, like the ascetics of Harvey's own scholarship, are not “one size fits all” but rather reflect and support a range of positionalities, spiritual ailments, and ascetic fortitudes.

This concentration on Eastern Christian bodily practices in late antiquity notwithstanding, Garb of Being also traces Harvey's influence into other eras and other disciplines. Among the contributions most temporally, if not methodologically, remote from these roots is Constance M. Furey's moving tribute to pedagogical relationship, “Sacred Bonds: Religion, Relationships, and the Art of Pedagogy.” The latter examines the intersection of familial and spiritual bonds in the context of the Sidney-Pembroke psalter, a sixteenth-century metrical translation begun by the poet Philip Sidney and completed by his sister, the English countess Mary Sidney Herbert. Through careful analysis of the text, Furey expounds the bond of sibling-love embedded in the network of wider social relations: with God; with biblical characters evincing a special relationship with the divine; and with the recipient of the psalter, Queen Elizabeth I. The psalter here becomes a window into sixteenth-century Protestants theology—an anchor for the quest for confidence in salvation, refracted through the security and joy derived from being part of that relational web—as well as a glimpse into the depth of relationships facilitated by structures, whether those of verse or of the classroom.

The resulting volume offers a satisfying tribute to Harvey's “pioneering methods and questions” and “timely insights into religious dimensions of bodily experience” both (10). More than that, however, it is a celebration of the diverse flowerings of scholarship and the vibrant community of scholars that her work has seeded. From its diverse constituents emerges a wonderfully curated book that should be of interest to all students of the body in its material, spiritual, and social valences.