Bonus episode courtesy of my new South African and Articles of Interest fans! What was the Birkin bag of the T&J era? Could someone tell the difference between a Roman and a Persian based on dress alone? Were couches and bedding like what we have today?
This episode we go deep into the color purple, marriage belts and baby tunics in a conversation all about sixth century Byzantine bling and threads thanks to the expertise of Dr. Elizabeth Dospěl Williams.
Betsy is the Curator of the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. Her work includes programs, publications and exhibitions exploring Byzantine dress practice, gender and aesthetics.
Bonus episode courtesy of my new South African and Articles of Interest fans! What was the Birkin bag of the T&J era? Could someone tell the difference between a Roman and a Persian based on dress alone? Were couches and bedding like what we have today?
This episode we go deep into the color purple, marriage belts and baby tunics in a conversation all about sixth century Byzantine bling and threads thanks to the expertise of Dr. Elizabeth Dospěl Williams.
Betsy is the Curator of the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. Her work includes programs, publications and exhibitions exploring Byzantine dress practice, gender and aesthetics.
Textiles and Jewelry with Betsy Williams
Big news everyone! The T&J podcast has made it as high as number 9 in South Africa’s Apple Podcast History category. That is insane. Like, I don’t know how you all even found me, send me an email at tandjbyz@gmail.com and let me know, if you like. But the show has been making some impressive moves in the rankings. From Jo’burg to Cape Town, Durban to Pretoria and all across your fantastic Amarula-drinking land! Which is why I’ve decided, in the spirit of celebration and gratitude to all of my new South African fans, to make this bonus episode available to everyone on the feed. Now, I adore every single one of you, my devoted listeners, including those who’ve just joined from the Articles of Interest podcast thanks to my recent Gothic write-up for the AOI newsletter — woohoo! This chat you’re about to hear on 6th century Byzantine fashion … it’s going to speak to you. I just want everyone listening to know that those who get T&J on their nation’s podcast charts get treats. I see you making the climb, Slovakia and Singapore. Now, enjoy.
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Christine Laskowski: Fashion is cyclical. It might take a couple hundred years.
Christine Laskowski: Welcome to the T&J podcast and my third bonus episode on T&J-era textiles and jewelry. I'm your host, Christine Laskowski and joining me with insights on what people slept in, upholstered with, and wore in sixth century Byzantium is Dr. Elizabeth Dospěl Williams. Dr. Williams is the curator of the Byzantine Collection at Dumbarton Oaks, whose work includes, but is not exclusive to, programs, publications, and exhibitions exploring Byzantine dress practice, gender, and aesthetics. Betsy, it's an honor to have you, welcome to the T&J podcast.
Betsy Williams: Thank you for having me. It's going to be a fun conversation.
Christine Laskowski: Before we start, tell us a little bit about Dumbarton Oaks for those listening who may not be familiar.
Betsy Williams: So, Dumbarton Oaks is a research center in Byzantine pre-Columbian and garden and landscape studies, and we're located in Washington, DC. And what that means is that we regularly welcome scholars from around the globe who come to use our library and our collections, museum collections. So, I work in the museum department of the institution, and we have one of the most important collections of Byzantine art in the world. We are a public-facing institution as well. So, anytime any of the listeners are in Washington, DC they're very welcome to come by and visit not only the museum collections with art from the Americas and the Mediterranean, but also to come and visit our gardens, because the gardens are also really, really beautiful.
Christine Laskowski: I definitely will. Okay, I want to start with textiles and then end with jewels. How does that sound?
Betsy Williams: Sounds good to me.
Christine Laskowski: What would you say is the greatest difference between the way 6th century Byzantines dressed and thought about dress compared to the way we do today?
Betsy Williams: Today, we tend to think of textiles as very throwaway. You know, the textiles in our home, the textiles that we wear.
And it's partially because textiles are pretty inexpensive. You know, you can go and buy clothes in the store and you probably don't think too, too much about the costs of making them or the technology to make them because they're just so readily available. And this was not the case in the Byzantine world. In the Byzantine world, the textiles counted among the most valuable objects in the household. They were often reused until they were threadbare, until they could no longer be used anymore. And so I think that this way of thinking about textiles was probably current until pretty recently, until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and this kind of mechanization of textile production. So I think this is one major difference in textiles. And I think with jewelry, the big difference is that jewelry was basically people's bank accounts on their bodies. And this issue of identity, I think, is also both similar and different to today. Certainly people were wearing jewelry to express their status or who they were in the community, but often not in the way that we understand identity today.
Christine Laskowski: One thing I'm always curious about is how we know what we know. And back to your point about how precious it was, clothing at least, for example, and how people would wear garments and use their textiles until they were threadbare. How did anything make it to us? I mean, yeah, how do we know what we know?
Betsy Williams: I guess we could think of different kinds of evidence, right? We can think about the objects themselves. So surviving textiles, surviving jewelry. And in that case, we're usually dealing with archaeological material, things that have either been buried in the ground for safekeeping and the owners never came back, or objects that were interred with people in the graves. In the case of Byzantine silks, for example, so many of them were particularly prized when they entered into Europe in the Middle Ages, so that actually the European Church Treasuries have incredible Byzantine silks, really, really high-end, some of the most beautiful. So we also have to think about the ways that visual sources and imagery can tell us about Byzantine dress. Wall paintings, mosaics, manuscripts. These are incredible sources of information for understanding what people wore and what it might have meant and how they decorated their homes. And then the last category of evidence that I think is really interesting maybe for our conversation today, too, is textual sources.So we can read about jewelry or we can read about furnishings or dress in all manner of literary sources and documentary sources. And so that can be, for example, Byzantine literature or dowries or divorce documents or wills, right? So in what the objects tell us, what the visual sources can tell us and what the documentary sources can tell us as well. And part of the work of this material is looking at these different sources and kind of saying, okay, where do we get information in one that we might not have in another? And this is really what makes it a very exciting area of research.
Christine Laskowski: What I'm focused on is this era I call the T&J era, which is from 450 to 570 AD. What garments from that era, as far as you know, made it to the 21st century? What do they tell us? And what does it feel like to interact with these pieces?
Betsy Williams: The most fun part of being a curator is that we get to work with the objects themselves. And this period that you're thinking about, the sixth century, is just such a rich period for surviving jewelry in particular, but also textiles as well. We have in museum collections, for example, some spectacular pieces of adornments. So this can be necklaces in particular or rings, earrings. We have really beautiful, you know, gemstone and gold jewelry. And these are some of the most iconic works of art in Byzantine art history, but I would even say in art history in general. And then we also have for textiles, as I mentioned, we have some surviving silks that we put into the 6th century. So thinking about the elites of Constantinople, what they might have worn, we can look at purple, red silks. Often they have very large repeat designs, very spectacular imagery with animals and pearl roundels and vegetation. So just very ornamentally dense and very spectacular. So I would say those are kind of like on the elite end of society. If we're thinking about, you know, looking at representations of the emperor and empress. And then we're also thinking about what is the dress of maybe a broader swath of society as well. And there we really benefit from objects that come from Egypt, from late antique Egypt in really late Roman through the late antique period. And there we have just an incredible array of linen, tunics and garments. Wool, they were very fond of woolen garments. Jewelry and bronze or kind of a range of different materials. And what we can begin to think about too, is what I find very surprising. When we think of the past, we tend to think of grays or, you know, dune sand colors. We might have this kind of vision of the past and this kind of maybe sepia tones. And when we look at the surviving objects themselves, what I find so exciting is just bright colors, incredible designs, even in the linen and woolen garments. So in a whole array of society, we had just a real love for color and different shades of color.
Christine Laskowski: Why do you think there is so much from the 6th century?
Betsy Williams: I tend to think that one of the reasons that the 6th century in the jewelry is so spectacular is because the empire was really quite well connected and quite wealthy. The history of jewelry is difficult to disentangle from economic history. So I think that what we're seeing when we see all these incredible pieces that place into 6th century, we have just a kind of a reflection of maybe the general state of the economy in the Mediterranean in the period.
Christine Laskowski: Living good, yeah.
Betsy Williams: And they were spending a lot of money on their jewels. And for textiles, the interesting thing with textiles is that you can carbon date. Textiles are organic material, right? Like linen, well, often we can get almost very precise dates for the gardens or for the furnishings. And really like this late Roman moment or late antique period, I would just have a lot that survives. And it may be the conditions of burial. It may be what scholars were interested in. And so it's best studied. I have to say, myself personally, I always find it incredible when I find like a sock that dates to, like,, the fourth century.
Christine Laskowski: I mean, it's kind of incredible. It's, like, I lose them every week. I mean, to have one make it from the fourth century, that is a miracle.
Betsy Williams: You know, it's more interesting, Christine, too, because part of this is also like a micro level history. And it's so powerfully clear that they were worn by human beings, that they were cared for by human beings. And I think particularly for the sixth century material, visually, it's just so stunning with these golds and, you know, amethysts and emeralds and pearls. And it's just very opulent. And it, in a way, served as an inspiration later for designers. Even today, Chanel makes Byzantine-inspired jewelry.
Christine Laskowski: Fashion is cyclical. It might take a couple hundred years. Do you get to touch them with your bare hands?
Betsy Williams: You know, it's a great question. The textiles are… I'm very aware of the fact that the textiles are grape goods. You know, in the United States, we have conversations around something called NAGPRA, which is the protection of indigenous graves. And so that I try to apply that mindset of how we treat Native American art for the textiles. And also they're often very fragmentary because they've been in the grave. So often it requires a lot of imagination to sort of reconstruct what kind of a garment it might have once been. I will say that for the jewelry, we also display the jewelry a great deal more because it's more stable. So textiles, we have to keep in the drawers and they have to kind of stay inert. But jewelry, I take out and I teach from it or I have exhibitions with it. And then we get to handle the artwork. And I have to tell you that this tactile dimension is really important for these objects. You know, how heavy they are. If you think about earrings or bracelets, often they were in pairs on the body. So we're thinking about symmetry, visual symmetry, but also the weight on the body as the body moves.
Christine Laskowski: Oh, interesting. Okay. So a lot of balance ...
Betsy Williams: Balance, exactly. You know, rings, you'll often see depictions of people wearing multiple rings. So again, I think the listeners can imagine what it's like when you feel when you have multiple things on, when you put something new on. So I think that that tactility or that kind of sensory experience is very important for these objects. And then another sensory experience increasingly of interest to, I think, scholars and curators is smell, right?
Christine Laskowski: Yeah, olfactory.
Betsy Williams: Olfactory experience. And so this is something that increasingly people are thinking about, because of course different places have different smells. We know from the textual sources that they scented the clothes or that the jewelry may have had scent. I've heard of an exhibition recently that had the option to have a scratch and sniff card that you could sniff and smell incense. Different ways of activating objects in a way that is imaginative but historically accurate, I think.
Christine Laskowski: Absolutely. Okay, I have some vocabulary questions because in my reading, I learned the terms for different garments, but I still don't really have a clear sense of what they mean.So I was hoping you could run us through what a chlamys is and if I'm even pronouncing it correctly, what is the difference between a tunic and a dalmatic, and are there other garments or pieces of jewelry that have very wonderful Byzantine names that we should know about?
Betsy Williams: It's often hard to know what the terms mean. And it's not just because the definition isn't clear, but also because to some degree the shape and the form changed over time. I think that one thing that in fashion studies is often said like, there was no pre-modern fashion because fashion is tied to change and it's only with the development of a capitalist market in Europe in the late medieval period do we have fashion. And what I've and other scholars have tried to do is sort of push back against that and to say, no, actually they did change. And I think that this confusion about what these terms mean is part of that function of dress, is something that changed. So chlamys in general, it's almost like a kind of cloak. And in this period, it's associated with military dress and imperial dress. So thinking about how it signaled profession or status, the dalmatic could also be for imperial dress. It kind of starts to become something associated with liturgical function, but again, a kind of robe. So if the chlamys is almost like a cloak and the dalmatic is more of like a robe. And then we have tunic. And I have to say, tunic is kind of like your catch-all term for everything.
And in terms of physical objects that survive, we have many, many, many, many tunics. So tunic, we see both complete tunics and fragmentary tunics. And we find tunics of all ages. So there are even children's tunics, infant tunics. So people who specialize in the Egyptian archaeological record actually can even track out how the tunic is changing shape over decades. And I will say again, because you're interested in the sixth century, one thing that unites all of these garments is that they had very, very little tailoring.
So they were very interested in draping. And so people often find belts are quite important or thinking about the chlamys like a kind of brooch that's maybe connecting it or keeping it together. They're not really creating garments, like they're not creating tailored pants, they're not creating tailored coats. It's not really until they begin encountering Persian culture, so Sasanian culture, they're always tailoring. Actually, this is very representative of Sassanian dress. So they're wearing pants, they're wearing stockings, they're wearing these beautiful coats that are fitted with these very long arms. We don't see that in the Mediterranean dress of the 6th century, but we do see it in the Sassanian dress of that period. And so it's just something to keep in mind, too, that these terms are very particular to these draped garments in the Mediterranean world of the time.
Christine Laskowski: Does that make it difficult to understand body shape and size?
Betsy Williams: You know, it's interesting. There is a museum display in Antwerp of late antique tunics, Egyptian tunics. They display them on mannequins. And I have to say that from a conservation standpoint, this is very complicated. You know, you can't just leave a dress hanging in a closet indefinitely at a certain point, like the fabric is going to have some give. It's very evocative when you walk into the room because you see these just super voluminous tunics and cloaks and layers of garments, all the different colors, different sizes, bunched up, kind of draped, right? And in a way that when you see them flat or when you see images of them, you can't really appreciate. So I think that you're right. Yeah, they were really playing with just like gobs and gobs of fabric, almost concealing the human form underneath. When we look at these textiles, what they'll often do is they'll decorate the shoulders with decoration, lines coming down from the shoulders. The sleeves are often decorated at the ends. So what they're trying to do, I think, is with all this voluminous cloth, they're trying to still pick out the human body with the decoration on the tunics as well.
Christine Laskowski: Like sort of touch points, like shoulders, wrists. Okay, listeners will know from my most recent enslavement episode that most clothing around this time, as you mentioned, was made mainly from linen and from wool and silk for the elite. But I was also really floored by this anecdote of Procopius, where he's describing these Armenian satraps who were given special chlamys made out of cloth from the Pinna nobilis bivalve, or a clam, basically. And this very luxurious cloth was known as sea silk or is known as ‘sea silk.’ Please, Betsy, tell me everything you know about sea silk.
Betsy Williams: You know, this is a topic where my art historical bias shows through because we don't have, that I know of, any surviving sea silk garments. But, you know, in terms of surviving silk, we do have super duper elite five-color silks that are clearly being made in protected factories and are only circulating in very elite contexts.
Christine Laskowski: Are they like the Birkin bag of their time?
Betsy Williams: They are absolutely the Birkin bag of their time! And how we know this is because we have these five-color or these multiple-color silks that today survive in these European church treasuries. And the question was always, were they being sent as diplomatic gifts? Did they travel with people? You know, these were not things just like the Birkin bag. You could go to the marketplace and be like, I'm going to buy myself a five-color Byzantine … Like, it just did not, it didn't happen. So that's like a very high level of production. And then we have silk that are often in two colors. And the two color silks are in a much less technologically complicated draw loom. So those we have surviving in Byzantine Egyptian graves, you know, still elite status, but in a much wider level. And just as an example, when we find them, we don't find entire garments made of these two color Byzantine silks. We find pieces that have been almost like scrapped together to decorate, you know, the shoulders or the parts that come off the shoulders or the sleeves. So they're clearly being very economical in how they use the silk. So it just goes to show this is like very still a high status object. But, you know, five color Byzantine silk, you were never, I would never have laid eyes on that ever.
Christine Laskowski: Well, I know today we have clothing made from all kinds of materials, a lot of it's synthetic. Tell me about what was available to people and what that hunt was like for new things.
Betsy Williams: So this question of cotton, for instance, is fascinating because from the point of view of the textual sources, we know that they were growing cotton in Egypt. But what's really interesting is we don't have that many surviving cotton furnishings or cotton garments. By and large, the evidence we have in Egypt is for linen and wool. What scholars have been thinking a lot about is, you know, maybe what was happening was that this raw material was being transported through the desert into East Africa. From East Africa, it was being traded through the Red Sea, going to India. And so the interesting thing is that there seems to be a kind of economy where they themselves are not interested in weaving cotton or preparing cotton. And again, anyone who knows the history of cotton knows that it's incredibly labor-intensive process. Obviously, they were outsourcing it for the labor costs, I would guess, and that these are being exported back to Egypt as finished textiles. So what does survive as cotton are these huge, enormous furnishings. They're clearly very specialized objects. So I think cotton is a really great example of a medium and a process and a kind of habit of decoration, because these are also decorated almost in like a tie-dye. And so it becomes a kind of economic question and a question of taste all tied together.
Christine Laskowski: Oh, that's fascinating. Okay, so cotton played a role. Is there anything else, any other material that I'm missing that we should know about?
Betsy Williams: You know, something I think that's really, really interesting as a material, and I have to admit this is not my specialization, but you know, dye, dye stuffs. And dye stuffs were also an incredibly valuable trade commodity and were often highly specialized in the regions where they were grown and has a lot of cultural meaning because of course people could recognize that a color might be rare or might be hard to obtain. And I think that in the sixth century, we have this question people always are very curious about, is purple, right? Like purple, we know, is a very important color. In those mosaics of Justinian and Theodora and Ravenna, you see a lot of purple outfits and purple dye. And that is partially because what we call in art history true purple. True purple is a dye that comes from the Murex snail. It's a kind of several species of mollusks that live in Eastern Mediterranean. And the most famous of these is the Tyrian purple that was really from the Roman period on just very prized. And the interesting thing about this dye and this material is that it comes from the gland of this mollusk. And you need to kill thousands and thousands of these tiny, tiny, tiny mollusks to get basically grams of this dye. So it explains why the dye was so valuable. There's a man in Tunisia who's been actually experimenting with this and trying to figure out how did they do it.
Christine Laskowski: I've seen videos of him. Yeah, it's fascinating. He's like taught himself because the process has been lost, no?
Betsy Williams: And so this is where I think this is like so fascinating, this knowledge that it was just known, like embodied knowledge that then is never recorded in a textual source.
Christine Laskowski: Well, we're gonna return to Tyre just after the short break.
[Break]
Christine Laskowski: Let's say I'm Praïecta from Tyre, and I'm a middle-class housewife. Walk me through what Praïecta's relationship to clothing and textiles would have been in her household as far as we know.
Betsy Williams: It's fascinating because we have so much information, actually, about women's possessions in the Late Antique Period and Early Byzantine Period. And we know this because when couples were married, there were legal documents that were drawn up that tell us about the possessions that the women were bringing into their households. And in a wealthier household, I would consider this a fairly wealthy household. You would have bedding, textiles, curtains, clothes would be listed in these dowries. So, you know, a person might have two tunics or two robes. You would have cushions and pillows. And these will be specified in the dowry as having a financial equivalence. And so that's how we know through the valuations that these were incredibly valuable. They might also have things like pots or pans or household utensils as well that would be listed in these documents. And jewelry was also listed in these dowry documents. But the interesting thing is that jewelry would be listed by weight. And again, this gets back to this theory that I've been thinking a lot about of jewelry as kind of a financial instrument. One of the reasons that these dowry documents and betrothal documents are so important is that they were also, the equivalent might be a prenup. It's maybe a little bit of a rough equivalence, but they were meant in the case of divorce to protect the women's property. And by extension, really her family's property, because this was stuff that she came into the marriage with. So I think that Praïecta, she would have cushions, bedding, a couple of tunics, some jewelry, and that this would be representing a kind of intergenerational wealth. And I think the other thing, back to what we talked about at the beginning, it's like this idea that the textiles and the jewelry were handed down in families and that they were used over and over again until they were threadbare. So I would imagine she would have things that would have belonged in her family for some time, things that she would have repaired, kept very carefully, kept reusing and reusing and reusing. And so I think that that is also interesting to think about. It's quite different from today.
Christine Laskowski: Yeah, oh, definitely. I mean, and just the normalization of patches on things doesn't really exist.
Betsy Williams: Exactly.
Christine Laskowski: So would Praïecta have worn pajamas to bed? And, you know, did people in 6th century Byzantium wear underwear? Was there anything like the equivalent of a bra or workout clothes?
Betsy Williams: If I'm thinking again about the archaeological evidence, we don't really have evidence for this. So I can't say for sure, but I tend to think they did. And I tend to think they did because there was clearly a recognition of different life stages, at least especially in the jewelry. And when I look at the tunics and I can see how they change styles, then I begin thinking like, okay, they were attentive to these details. You know, it's an interesting point because so much of what we know for the dress practices comes from burials. And if you really think about it, the burials are kind of a construct because they demonstrate how people wanted to be remembered or how their families wanted to remember the people who were being buried. That creates this kind of ...
Christine Laskowski: That's a really interesting point, yeah ...
Betsy Williams: … open-endedness that that's just almost like freezing them in time. And if we go a little bit earlier and look at, let's say, the late Roman funerary portraits, we have some beautiful funerary portraits of women and men, but of women from the late antique period. So again, like third, fourth century in Egypt. And we can see that they're really paying a lot of attention to how they present themselves in these portraits. And so that feels like maybe a good source of evidence for this idea that it meant something to them, that they were looking carefully at each other. And just to give an example, very concrete, often in these funerary portraits, you will see the women wearing hairpins or they'll be wearing multiple rings or multiple necklaces. So I tend to think that probably layering was very important to them aesthetically. If their grave survives to us today, it's because they were not laborers. So I tend to think that those people, whatever they were wearing would have been quite simple, maybe a simple tunic. Maybe they would be lucky if they owned one tunic. I think there's also some question of how many garments did a person wear in their lifetime? And one evidence we have that maybe people didn't have that many different kinds of clothes is they seem to have been very fond of belts. So belts would be a great way to kind of let your clothes out or take them back in over the course of your lifetime if you had gained weight or lost weight or whatever.
Christine Laskowski: No, that's a good way of putting it.
Betsy Williams: Yeah.
Christine Laskowski: My next question is about periods. What did women use for their periods? Do we know?
Betsy Williams: I don't know for this period. I don't know if anyone's investigated this, I have to say.
Christine Laskowski: Yeah, no, I'm just curious. For me, it's like the opposite of what did armor look like and consist of. I'm like, what was the sixth century Byzantine tampon or pad made of?
Betsy Williams: No, that was more in the lived experience. And again, this is why it's incredible and sad. At the same time, we have children's tunics. And I have to say, they are teeny tiny infant tunics. And so again, it's a reminder that all of these concerns that we have, how to dress your baby, how to dress your toddler, how to handle your period, I mean, these were all, there was a textile for that, kind of as the answer. You know, like there's a whole kind of class of tunics, they almost look like onesies, but they have a flap that opens at the neck. And you know, when you think of babies in their big heads, like you can just imagine like opening it and pulling it on the baby, the baby trying to get away and kind of squirm away.
Christine Laskowski: Oh, totally. One of the things I wanted to ask you about was upholstery. I, you know, in my reading of Justinian and Theodora and where they were crowned emperor and empress was in this room known as the Hall of the 19 Couches. When I think of a couch, I have something very specific in mind that's probably not too dissimilar from what you would think in your mind when I say the word couch. How does that translate to a sixth century Byzantine idea of a couch?
Betsy Williams: The evidence from Constantinople, of course, is going to be so … We just don't have it, right? So we have to rely on visual depictions, we have to rely on other sources. But what I can say is if we think about super luxury furnishings, certainly they were using ivory, so you could imagine a kind of wood frame with ivory decoration and the surviving fragments we have of bone often have mythological figures or ornamental figures. And then, you know, thinking about the textiles that would have appeared on it, if you're imagining maybe cushions, in an elite setting maybe made of silk or drapery made of silk. I didn't mention this, but this is a great maybe point to think about too is that the way that they were dressing, the kind of patterns they were using, the colors they were using, the technique of the weaving was quite similar to the furnishings.
Christine Laskowski: Okay.
Betsy Williams: Often to the point that when we have fragments, it's sometimes hard to tell, did it come from a furnishing, did it come from a garment.
Christine Laskowski: That's interesting.
Betsy Williams: We tend to distinguish these. And I think that that's also something that was more fluid for them to the point that what might have been decorating the couches or the bedding or the chairs would probably resemble quite a bit what they were wearing. So there was a kind of a more like immersive environment, I say, that we could think of.
Christine Laskowski: How might the relationship to textiles be different for ...
Betsy Williams: Quadratus.
Christine Laskowski: Quadratus. So Quadratus is a young man in Antioch who was, let's say, a diehard Blues fan who never missed a single day at the races. What would his relationship to textiles have been like? Would it have been that radically different from, say, Praïecta, the housewife? As you mentioned, layers, draping, or, you know, was there something else going on with young men at the time?
Betsy Williams: Well, this is a really interesting perspective also on our own scholarly biases because there are not many, and I include myself in this number, not many people who study men's dress in this period. It's sort of an underappreciated category of dress practice, and I think it's partially because we don't often get insight into women's lives, so going through the textiles and the jewelry is an amazing opportunity to reassert women's agency or kind of understand their wealth or all these things. So we don't know too, too much about men's dress, but we do have, again, these glimpses. If we look at visual representations, say, for example, of soldiers, and soldiers wearing certain kinds of cuts of garment or they have certain kinds of necklaces that they're wearing, so that's giving us a clue about maybe military dress. If we think about this preference for very short tunics, we see, for example, in the David plates, right, which are sixth century in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So that's again giving us a sense, like, you know, something that was signaling his youth or signaling his kind of status as a warrior. So, you know, this is where we're kind of piecing together what the visual depictions could tell us. And I think that this interest in men's dress is an area where we could maybe spend some more time because I think that we actually don't know so, so much from the surviving evidence. And I will say that it also raises the question about maybe gender identity. If you were to look at the tunics, often we base the gender identity of the wearers on the size of the tunic. And that is not always completely reliable, right? So I think that there's just more, more to be done.
Christine Laskowski: Yeah, that's so interesting to know. We are going to talk more about what sixth century Byzantine women thought looked super cool and sexy and fancy once we come back from a short break.
[Break]
Christine Laskowski: I wanted to consult a little mosaic located in the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy. My understanding is it's the only confirmed surviving depiction of Theodora, is that right?
Betsy Williams: Yeah, yeah.
Christine Laskowski: So it's the only one we have of her, and she is wearing some full Imperial regalia, and she is not alone. There are other people in this picture. Betsy, walk us through what we can learn about T&J-era fashion just from this mosaic alone.
Betsy Williams: I mean, this mosaic, I have to say, Christine, is like, it's such a rich source, and every time I look at it, I see new things. You can see she's got her chlamys, she's got that cloak, she's got a tunic underneath. You remember I was telling you, like, they love to mark out the edges of the body, so you can see at the bottom marking of the hem.
Christine Laskowski: Yes.
Betsy Williams: You've got this kind of floral pattern against gold. She has also got circular emblem at her shoulder as well. And then she has this purple garment. The purple garment, we presume, is of silk and maybe even a kind of embroidery, because you can see at the bottom, there are these figures who are dressed as Persians. They're the Three Magi.
Christine Laskowski: Wait, that's what those are? No way!
Betsy Williams: Yeah, yeah.
Christine Laskowski: And you know that because they're wearing pants?
Betsy Williams: They're wearing pants and they are offering gifts. And they're offering gifts in the same way she is offering a gift. You can see they've got bowls that they're offering, replicating her generosity, her donation.
Christine Laskowski: I never put that together before. I love that.
Betsy Williams: Yeah, so probably an embroidery doesn't look woven to me, but we don't have anything that survives that looks like this. And then her jewelry, and her jewelry is just like, where do we begin? Pearls, like so many pearls.
Christine Laskowski: And they're huge. Would they, do you think, can we believe that they would be this size?
Betsy Williams: I mean, I say why not? Like they're pretty accurate everywhere else than what we're seeing in this image.
Christine Laskowski: They're like ping pong ball size almost. Yeah, they're massive.
Betsy Williams: So she's got this pearl hairnet, and then she's got the crown that's got these different gemstones, sapphires, emeralds. And then you can see hanging from the crown are even more strands of pearls. She has also got earrings on, and they seem to me to be sapphire. And again, we have earrings that survive like this in the Dumbarton Oaks collection. So like these are just, that was what they were doing. And then she's got also some kind of brooch on her right shoulder. There's something kind of coming up off her.
Christine Laskowski: Oh, that's true, yeah.
Betsy Williams: I have never really understood this. It looks to me like a brooch. And maybe I'm thinking that because of Justinian on the other side, but just like layers and layers and layers and layers and layers of jewelry. And she's got these gold shoes that are kind of separating her apart as well. And I will say there are shoes that survive from Late Antique Egypt and sometimes they're leather. Sometimes they are gilded. So they definitely had gilded leather shoes.
Christine Laskowski: Wow.
Betsy Williams: And then the interesting thing is, to look at the women who are behind her in this procession, right? And they are wearing all manner of silk. And the reason that I think it's silk is because of this repeating pattern. So silk is done on a draw loom and a draw loom repeats the pattern because it's kind of like a mechanized process that you set up a pattern and the pattern repeats and repeats and repeats. So the fact that you can see that they're wearing these cloaks that have repeating patterns, to me, says silk. And especially the second woman, you can see she's got a cloak on with all these almost blossom patterns repeating. And then she's got underneath it some kind of silk that has birds. I think they're tiny birds, which is again, very Sasanian actually, Sasanian style with these bird patterns. So maybe this isn't even an imported silk. And the woman that's too behind her is wearing a green garment like that too with bird patterns.
Christine Laskowski: It's almost like a wrapping paper or wallpaper type pattern too. I mean, obviously that's not what they're wearing, but it kind of gives off that vibe.
Betsy Williams: It totally does. And they're just, it's like a lot of patterns.
Christine Laskowski: Yes.
Betsy Williams: And then you'll notice that the women are all wearing similar kinds of earrings, again, pearls with sapphire. They're wearing collars as well with sapphires that are hanging from them. The woman who's got that red cloak on and who looks like a kerchief, she even has, it looks like a watch, but it's actually a kind of bracelet that's got some kind of setting. And again, we have bracelets that survive that look like this, that have coins in them. So all of this jewelry, I can tell you like there's in Berlin, an incredible collar like that in the Antikensammlung. So things track very, very closely to what we see here. And then the last thing I'll note is that we have the men, these military figures who are at the head of this procession. And you can see already, they're wearing yet a different kind of clothing. So they've got their tunics with their belts. So that red belt, I told you, belts are very, very important.
Christine Laskowski: You would almost miss it because it's, you just see the little, the tiniest bit of the band, yeah.
Betsy Williams: You can see they have again, decoration at the sleeves, decoration on the arms, decoration right along the bottom as well. And they very famously have these brooches that are keeping the clam as closed. And they're in the shape of almost like a sword. And again, we have surviving examples of that jewelry as well. So I would say this is pretty closely observed. And while we don't have textiles that match onto this, we do have jewelry that matches onto this. So I don't doubt that this represents some reality of textiles as well and dress as well. It's just so carefully observed and it really does track really beautifully to material evidence.
Christine Laskowski: Let's pan across to Justinian's mosaic just really fast. I mean, we've touched on a lot of these details already, but I just feel like, you know, he is the J in the T&J podcast. So just give him some spotlight here. So what is he wearing? I see like a massive fucking jewel on his brooch. Is that a ruby? Were rubies a thing? What are we talking here?
Betsy Williams: Yeah, so we are looking at probably, I mean, rubies, I can't say garnets for a big item. And again, he's got pearls that are hanging from his crown. Justinian himself is again wearing some kind of silk panel on his silk chlamys. So he's got this bird pattern and roundels. So this is how again, I know it's silk because we're seeing the repetition that you expect in silk. And yeah, and his shoes are fabulous as well. He's got purple shoes with gemstones on them that distinguish him, set him apart. You can see the three figures immediately behind him are also wearing this kind of military garb. And they've got those brooches as well with this cross shape or sword shape. The interesting thing I think also about this is if you look behind these military figures, you can see that there is an army.
Christine Laskowski: Yeah, that big shield and they're carrying spears of some kind, it looks like.
Betsy Williams: And you'll notice that they're wearing these necklaces that have these huge pendants.
Christine Laskowski: Yeah.
Betsy Williams: These are called pectorals. And again, we have these that survive. There's one in Berlin in the Antikensammlung. There's another one in the Met, you know, with coin setting in them. So again, tying the image of the emperor, the army, this jewelry, it's kind of all coming together. And what's really, really interesting is that based on the depictions, we always talked about those pectorals as belonging to men because we see them in military depictions. And actually the one that's in Berlin has an inscription on the back that names the wearer. It says, ‘please protect the wearer.’ And the wearer is in the feminine. So maybe the theory is that perhaps these are actually being worn and owned by both men and women. And again, this is where like this idea that it's an heirloom or something that's being handed down or that our gender divisions for this material are maybe not always accurate.
Christine Laskowski: Were there any sorts of precious stones or jewelry that one might associate with certain stages of life, like an engagement ring or a wedding ring or for something else entirely?
Betsy Williams: Absolutely. We have jewelry that represents marriage scenes. And this seems to be a tradition on rings most particularly. So rings that name the couple or depict a couple, you know, male and female names on a ring and words like harmony or grace or things like that. So we guess that that would be something that would have been worn for a wedding ceremony or some commemorating marriage or something like this. By the sixth century, we find examples that have a Christian cast to it. So Christ will appear in the ring. And then the most famous example we have are these so-called marriage belts. And there are two of them. One of them is at Dumbarton Oaks, one of them is at the Louvre. They're medallions, it's two medallions, and they depict a couple holding hands, exchanging rings, and Christ is in the middle of the couple. And it says, ‘from God heart grace.’ So it's anecdotally an object that seems to refer to some kind of marital exchange. What's peculiar is we don't really have a great record for how this would have been used in actual ceremony. And that's partially because the documents are always very concerned with financial transaction on the moment of the engagement or betrothal. Or, you know, they're very much concerned with like money, like money. And what I find interesting is I began thinking about it was, you know, these marriage belts, they're again, these big medallions, and then lots of little medallions that go around. They start looking like coins to me at a certain point. So I wondered whether they're commemorating somehow, maybe an exchange of money, financial exchanges that would have happened in these life events. And the interesting thing was that for the one at Dumbarton Oaks, the marriage belt at Dumbarton Oaks, no one had ever weighed it. We didn't know how much it weighed. So we weighed it and it weighed the equivalent of about 26 or 27 gold coins.
So then you go, oh my gosh, if the average salary in sixth century Egypt, I asked my colleague Jonathan Shea here, who's the curator of the Coins and Seals. He said, okay, the average salary in Egypt in the sixth century is one solidest, one gold coin a month. So then you go, oh my gosh, this is like two years of salary. This belt is like two years of median salary in Egypt in the time. And then you begin to again go, okay, that must have, it's not a coincidence that this looks like money on a belt.
Christine Laskowski: My last question for you, in my enslavement episode, I, the best way I can put it is I was surprised by how surprised I was that the history of clothing production and manufacture can't really be separated from the history of enslaved people and more specifically enslaved women. But tell me what you know about labor in the creation of jewelry in this period.
Betsy Williams: I think it's a great question. And I think it just draws attention to the fact that, you know, it's easy to admire these objects and people do like no doubt, like they're incredible objects, like the jewelry is sixth century jewelry. There's nothing more beautiful. But I think it's very important also to always keep in mind underneath it that what we have is ultra, ultra, ultra, ultra elite, one. And two, that the social inequalities that were built into the extraction, the making, the trading of those kinds of objects were profound, like really, really, really profound. So part of it when you see Theodora and Justinian decked out in these incredible things is to understand that behind it, there were all of these processes, economic processes that made it so rare that it was not just a beautiful fashion choice. It was an expression of brute power, like just total brute power as well. So I think it's maybe a shift in understanding jewelry from being beautifying to being something that had like profound social, cultural, economic implications.
Christine Laskowski: Betsy, it has been wonderful speaking with you. Thank you so, so much for coming on.
Betsy Williams: Thank you. And again, jewelry and textiles like can't ask for better. It's just such an insight into their world and a source of continuing inspiration for sure. So thank you, Christine.
Christine Laskowski: Big shout out to Lori Karchner, another DC textile museum doyen, without whom I may have never found Betsy. Thank you, Lori. But also shout outs to you, my wonderful Patreon and Apple Podcast subscribers, leaving positive reviews, telling people about T&J, your financial support truly means the world because not only do your donations pay for pesky things that allow me to keep the show going, it's also a tremendous morale boost. So enjoy these bonus episodes, my dear T&J subscribers, because they are truly, truly just for you.