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Youth in Antiquity

them, such as the virginity/asceticism issue, already have books devoted to them alone. Some examples though, we should be grateful to C. for bringing back to our attention; I am thinking specifically about her sections on 'Clothes and Dress Codes', 'The Image of Theodora' and 'Clothing as Language' (pp. 105-18). Both the fact that most textiles in the ancient world were made and worn by women, and that women were often criticized for their jewellery and expensive and ostentatious clothing, should make us aware that fashion was as great a marker, though in different ways, in ancient times as it can be today, in certain social circles. C.'s patchwork metaphor, an attempt to reconstruct life 'by piecing together scraps of material for a different purpose and to a different effect from that intended by their original makers.' (p. 4), works most aptly in this context, using art history, law codes, prescriptive patristic texts and visual evidence as well as acknowledging contemporary work on fashion and image. She has produced a thought-provoking section on dress and its implications for representations of power and femaleness. C. herself warns against making generalizations from the fragmentary nature of the evidence and its almost exclusively male provenance. It is recognized that history cannot be constructed from a series of 'collected instances', but we can recognize some ways in which some women's lives were 'perceived, interpreted, and (if possible) regulated in terms of leading ideas, priorities, assumption, and interests' (p. 2). This very readable and accessible book achieves that for women's lifestyles in the late antique period.