What is dress for? This wide-ranging collection seeks to explore the meanings of dress in the contexts of Judaism and early Christianity. Notwithstanding the editorial intention to provide an interdisciplinary approach, it draws on mainly textual sources, such as the writings of early church fathers and early Christian apocrypha. Many of the authors (for instance E. Vearncombe, M. Warren and C. Daniel-Hughes) focus principally on how references to dress in written sources serve particular goals within the aims of the text, rather than (perhaps more difficult) exploring how these attitudes to, and uses of, dress might intersect with the real world of clothed bodies. The archaeological evidence of extant textiles is rarely referred to, and some of the visual sources (specifically the frescoes showing saints with bodies covered with hair) seem to be presented as supplementary curiosities rather than being the subject of detailed critical analysis. Yet the book has much to offer to the dress historian or archaeologist as well as the literary scholar, particularly in its emphasis on the importance of context in our evaluations of ancient dress. A. Batten, for instance, shows that the meanings attributed to pearls in the eastern and western Roman Empire need to be understood within the wider economic context. Pearls were valuable everywhere, but in the East were a commodity to be exploited and thus a producer of wealth. In textual descriptions in the East, they can be used as a synonym for holiness, while in the West, the connotations are overwhelmingly ones of luxury, to the point of an undesirable orientalism and moral laxity.

Temporal and spatial context is also considered to good effect in some further papers that examine restrictions on dress items. A strong contribution by A. Serfass examines a famous dispute over the use of the pallium (in this context, a scarf-like item associated with episcopal office). According to Gregory the Great, it should be worn only when celebrating mass. John of Ravenna meanwhile makes an argument from local tradition that prescribes its use more widely, even in penitential processions. The sidelight onto regional dress practices is interesting, but more significantly, the article illuminates the power given to dress items, in this instance, to materialize both papal approval and benediction, and episcopal subjection to the authority of the Holy See. Another paper that examines temporal/spatial circumstances that constrain dress practices is that by N. Cohn, which among other things investigates the restrictions laid out in the Mishnah on women's clothing worn on the Sabbath outside the house. The ambiguity of some of the prohibitions (some do not attract punishment, and so would be hard to enforce) suggests a degree of negotiation and compromise with daily practice that could have been explored by the author in more depth.

In the introduction, the editors provide a useful short historiography of the study of dress, which it would be nice to see expanded into a full study in the future. They then discuss approaches to the study of dress, including the way that dress can be used to represent or construct identities, but also how it may instill particular behaviours and attitudes, through the combination of the cultural resonances of a specific dress item with its physical qualities that foster particular experiences. There is partial engagement with this in the individual chapters, for instance the instrumentality of dress in ritual transformation as touched on by Daniel-Hughes, but there is scope for further consideration. A. Urbano opens his chapter with a fascinating quotation from Tertullian on the oppressive nature of the toga as compared to the liberating ease of the pallium (here the familiar Greek costume rather than the episcopal scarf treated by Serfass) which exemplifies the way that bodily constraints fostered by a garment can intersect with other meanings. Rather than exploring this, however, Urbano discusses instead (very productively) the way that the pallium constructed different identities during different periods. A discrepancy between visual representations and actual practice is suggested, in that the pallium appears, from the evidence of written sources, to be developing unfashionable connotations of paganism at the same time as it is being used as a signifier of Christian authority in visual art.

The examination within the book of the pallium in two quite different manifestations indicates the difficulty of understanding dress terms used in antiquity. This is further illustrated by J. Taylor in an examination of a ninth-century representation of Josephus that she suggests may be based on a corrupted Latin translation of a passage in which he describes priestly dress. The attempt to interpret coin images as representing Judaic priestly dress in particular is perhaps less successful, given the way that such images tend to represent stereotypes rather than specicifities.

The structure of the book aims to encapsulate the diversity of its contents within particular themes, such as ‘dress and the social body’, or ‘dress and material realities’, but as the editors observe, there is much overlap between these various categories, and so they are of arguable value. Yet overall, the book is an impressive one, demonstrating thoughtful approaches, both grounded in close textual analysis and successfully drawing upon a wide range of social theory that yields new perspectives on the question of what Judean and early Christian dress is for.