Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c. 800–1200

Abstract

In this enjoyable, learned and persuasive book, Maureen C. Miller looks at the clothing of secular clergy in the Latin West, with an emphasis on the centuries between 800 and 1200. The chronological boundaries are flexible at either end and with good reason: most clerical vestments developed in the early church and it was in the decades following the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that they came to be particularly intensely discussed and interpreted. Miller is concerned with how priests dressed both while officiating and outside of their liturgical functions (‘clerical street-wear’, p. 13). In fact, the distinction between the two is one of her main themes: she charts the rise of a ‘new ornate style’ of liturgical vestments—which ‘[came] into view in the mid-ninth century and [was] ubiquitous throughout Europe by the late eleventh’ (p. 145)—on the one hand and the generalized usage of a simple, long, dark closed cloak for wearing outside of sacral space on the other. This is a distinction that we know from Catholic and high Protestant churches to this day: colourful ornamented, many-layered vestments in services, simple dark clothing elsewhere, albeit with considerable room for variation in either case (think of the joyfully satirized ecclesiastical fashion show in Fellini’s Roma ).