Roman Wives, Roman Widows : The Appearance of New Women and the Pauline Communities

In ancient Roman law you were what you wore. This legal principle became highly significant because, beginning in the first century A.D., a "new" kind of woman emerged across the Roman empire - a women whose provocative dress and sometimes promiscuous lifestyle contrasted starkly with the decorum of the traditional married women. What a woman chose to wear came to identify her as either "new" or "modest."
Augustus legislated against the "new" woman. Philosophical schools encouraged their followers to avoid embracing her way of life. And, as this fascinating book demonstrates for the first time, the presence of the "new" woman was also felt in the early church, where Paul exhorted Christian wives and widows to emulate neither her dress code nor her conduct.

Bruce W. Winter is director of the Institute of Early Christianity in the Graeco-Roman World, Tyndale House, Cambridge, a Fellow of St. Edmund's College, and a member of the Divinity Faculty, University of Cambridge. He was recently elected a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia