Late Antique Coptic Textiles, Secular and Sacred: Textiles from Karanis, Egypt at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Descriptions of Clothing in Coptic Monastic Texts

Abstract

This Senior Individualized Project consists of two parts: a museum internship completed at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology in Ann Arbor, Michigan during the summer of 1998,.and a research project begun at the University of Michigan Graduate Library and completed at Kalamazoo College during the fall quarter of 1998. It is a two credit project: the internship was done for the Classics department and the research paper was written for the history department. I wanted to keep the topic of the paper in the general range of the focus of the internship, which brought me to late antique Egypt. As I have always been fascinated by early Christianity, I thus decided to focus on ecclesiastical vestments. This led me to read through early religious writings. As I was reading through monastic texts, I became fascinated by the references to clothing and the clothing imagery used in the monks' writings; the topic of my paper evolved into a consideration of the use of clothing imagery in the primary sources.