Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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The History and Development of Vestments

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The History and Development of Vestments

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Herbert Norris's study of Christian liturgical vestments traces a garment's development the way a costume historian would, following a specific piece, the chasuble, the stole, the alb, from its origin in ordinary late antique dress through the centuries in which it stopped changing with everyday fashion and instead became fixed, its form now belonging to the church rather than to whatever people happened to be wearing outside it.

That pattern, an item of ordinary clothing frozen in an earlier form once it becomes sacred dress, while everyday fashion around it keeps moving, recurs well beyond Christianity and is one of the clearest signs a scholar has that a garment has crossed over into specifically religious use. A garment's datable origin in ordinary dress, followed by its later stability while ordinary dress around it kept changing, is itself part of the documented evidence for when and how it became sacred.

Describing that history is not the same as reconstructing or supplying a garment for anyone to wear; an entry on religious dress, this one included, records the documented history of a form from published scholarship, the same discipline any closed or restricted practice on the atlas is held to, without instructing a reader in wearing or making the garment itself.

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Sources
Church Vestments: Their Origin and Development
Herbert Norris, J. M. Dent and Sons, 1949
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