Adornments of empire: Early Christian dress and the colonial composition of gender
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article considers anti-adornment rhetoric circulating in Roman antiquity and in two of the earliest and most extensive treatments of dress by early Christian writers, namely, treatises by Tertullian of Carthage and Clement of Alexandria. It treats ancient Roman-period discourses of anti-adornment to reveal how configurations of gender were entangled in Roman-imperial race–making and colonial projects. Tertullian’s and Clement’s treatments of adornment, it argues, likewise rehearse Roman colonial imaginaries. Their declamations against luxurious dress and adornment are read here as registering Roman colonial anxieties about the intermingling of populations, the influx of goods and peoples, and the fluctuating dynamics of social belonging and self-display Roman imperial order demanded. It concludes that these Christian authors’ discourse on gendered adornment indicates their investment in and contributions to ancient Roman ethno-racial and imperial formations. Finally, in conversation with Americanist Anne Anlin Cheng’s concept of “ornamentalism,” it offers a brief consideration of how their rhetoric figures in the longue durée of western imaginaries of Asiatic femininity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".