A catalog to an exhibition of Egyptian fabrics at the University of Illinois Krannert Art Museum in Champaign-Urbana, providing information on the color distribution, configuration, function, and subject of over one hundred weavings, and including an essay on the textile industry in Egypt in the Greek and Roman periods.

While the monumental sculptures of ancient Egypt are more widely known, the simple pleasures of life as it was lived are better portrayed in textiles, which carried designs commemorating the joys of festivals, food, and dancing.The Rich Life and the Dancepresents 103 full-colour images of the astonishing textile collection of Rose Choron, featuring rare examples from Egypt's Coptic Christians as well as the Islamic period. Dating primarily from the third to seventh centuries, these hand-woven fabrics showcase colourful images of dancers, haloed saints with hands raised in prayer, and a plethora of flowers and animals evoking the bountiful ecology of the Nile Delta. Some display Arabic inscriptions celebrating divine power, and all offer insights into a lost world: people's dress, their interior decoration, and their view of their relationship with the natural and supernatural worlds. Eunice Dauterman Maguire explains the work by providing a rich historical and mythic context, as well as detailed technical explanations. This volume also features a preface by Rose Choron herself, explaining the origins of the collection and the source of her fascination with the textiles.

Artefact evidence has the unique power to illuminate many aspects of life that are rarely explored in written sources, yet this potential has been underexploited in research on Roman and Late Antique Egypt. This book presents the first in-depth study that uses everyday artefacts as its principal source of evidence to transform our understanding of the society and culture of Egypt during these periods. It represents a fundamental reference work for scholars, with much new and essential information on a wide range of artefacts, many of which are found not only in Egypt but also in the wider Roman and late antique world. By taking a social archaeology approach, it sets out a new interpretation of daily life and aspects of social relations in Roman and Late Antique Egypt, contributing substantial insights into everyday practices and their social meanings in the past. Artefacts from University College London's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology are the principal source of evidence; most of these objects have not been the subject of any previous research. The book integrates the close study of artefact features with other sources of evidence, including papyri and visual material. Part one explores the social functions of dress objects, while part two explores the domestic realm and everyday experience. An important theme is the life course, and how both dress-related artefacts and ordinary functional objects construct age and gender-related status and facilitate appropriate social relations and activities. There is also a particular focus on wider social experience in the domestic context, as well as broader consideration of economic and social changes across the period.

Transmitting and Circulating the Late Antique and Byzantine Worlds seeks to be a crucial contribution to the history of medieval connectedness.

Iconoclasm, the debate about the legitimacy of religious art that began in Byzantium around 730 and continued for nearly 120 years, has long held a firm grip on the historical imagination. Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era is the first book in English to survey the original sources crucial for a modern understanding of this most elusive and fascinating period in medieval history. It is also the first book in any language to cover both the written and the visual evidence from this period, a combination of particular importance to the iconoclasm debate. The authors, an art historian and a historian who both specialise in the period, have worked together to provide a comprehensive overview of the visual and the written materials that together help clarify the complex issues of iconoclasm in Byzantium.

In spite of the Orthodox liturgy's reputation for resistance to change, Byzantine liturgical dress underwent a period of extraordinary elaboration from the end of the eleventh century onwards. As part of this development, embroideries depicting holy figures and scenes began to appear on the vestments of the clergy. Examining the surviving Byzantine vestments in conjunction with contemporary visual and textual evidence, Woodfin relates their embroidered imagery both to the program of images used in churches, and to the hierarchical code of dress prevailing in the imperial court. Both sets of visual cross-references serve to enforce a reading of the clergy as living icons of Christ. Finally, the book explores the competing configurations of the hierarchy of heaven as articulated in imperial and ecclesiastical art. It shows how the juxtaposition of real embroidered vestments with vestments depicted in paintings, allowed the Orthodox hierarchy to represent itself as a direct extension of the hierarchy of heaven. Drawing on the best of recent scholarship in Byzantine liturgy, monumental painting, and textile studies, Woodfin's volume is the first major illustrated study of Byzantine embroidered vestments to appear in over forty years.

Medieval art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire, but less known are the profound artistic contributions of Nubia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had an indelible impact on the medieval Mediterranean world. Bringing together more than 170 masterworks in a range of media and techniques—from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, panel paintings, and religious manuscripts—Africa and Byzantium recounts Africa’s centrality in transcontinental networks of trade and cultural exchange. With incisive scholarship and new photography of works rarely or never before seen in public, this long-overdue publication sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of late antique Africa. It reconsiders northern and eastern Africa’s contributions to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of the region as a vibrant, multiethnic society of diverse languages and faiths that played a crucial role in the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond.