Worldly Adornments: Women's Precious Metal Jewelry in the Early Medieval Eastern Mediterranean (500-1100 CE)

Silver and gold jewelry counted among women's most precious possessions in the Byzantine and early Islamic eastern Mediterranean. Such adornments figure prominently in texts, and numerous examples have been found in recent excavations. Most scholarship on such jewelry focuses on the dating of individual pieces and on identifying centers of production; yet such studies are fundamentally frustrated by the objects themselves, which resist easy classification. In this dissertation, a different methodology is presented, which weaves together texts, objects, and visual representations to explore thematic issues, including concerns about appearance, the preservation and presentation of wealth, taste-making, and idealized beauty. This dissertation starts with concrete uses of jewelry in women's lives and moves to more abstract questions about ornamentation and adornment. Chapter one presents evidence for jewelry's functions in dowries, marriage ceremonies, and burial, focusing on continuities and divergences in practices as Islam dominated in the region. The second chapter focuses on evidence for jewelry as part of fashionable dress, showing that stylish women's jewelry transcended regional or sectarian dress practices. Issues of sectarian allegiance and women's appearances come through in greater detail in the third chapter, which studies normative Christian, Jewish, and Islamic religious sources to outline how texts sought to regulate women's jewelry and dress. Chapter four considers moralistic attitudes towards the adorned female form shared in Christian and Islamic sources, where adornment served as common shorthand for discussions about the dangers of the wonton display of wealth and the merits of divine beauty. This leads to a broader evaluation of adornment in the conclusion, which argues for an aesthetic of jewel-encrusted surfaces shared both by Byzantium and the Islamic world. Finally, this dissertation concludes with catalogues documenting finds and presumed hoards that can be securely dated to the medieval eastern Mediterranean through their archaeological contexts. Throughout, it will become apparent that the close study of jewelry from these periods is important for prompting questions about the relationship of widespread political and social change to lived experiences on the microlevel during the transformative centuries of the late antique and medieval periods.