Maureen C. Miller shows how the development of a new, highly ornate style of liturgical attire was used throughout the Carolingian Empire to promote clerical virtue and to announce the increasing power of bishops. From the mid-ninth century, the successors of Charlemagne embraced the new style of gold-ornamented vestments made of costly silks, as opposed to the simple garb required of monastics, citing the example of Aaron's vestments, which God had commanded be made of ‘gold and hyacinth and purple and scarlet’ (Exodus xxviii.3–5). At the same time, clerics developed a set of spiritual practices -- the recitation of vesting prayers, the bestowal of vestments in ordination rites, and the making and wearing of reliquary vestments -- that visibly defined lavish clerical attire as a sign of virtue rather than an indication of vice or worldly excess. This new sartorial language successfully tied holiness and power to elaborate garb. Miller draws mainly on historical sources – legislation, liturgical texts, charters, inventories, chronicles and letters – to determine clothing practices, while also offering evidence from surviving textiles and garments. Her interest lies ultimately in the intersection between people and objects: in the ways in which individuals in the Middle Ages made, used, understood and imagined ornate vestments. Through this lens, women come to the fore as the artists who created and developed the new ornate style of clothing. Elite women, common women and enslaved women labourers participated to varying degrees, alongside the clergy, in the design and production, decoration and repair of garments. The significant tension that resulted from the clergy working so closely with women is recorded in their hidden exhortations to clerics inscribed on the concealed surfaces of inner garments. Chapters include an overview of clerical clothing in early Christianity and early medieval Europe; an account of Carolingian efforts at reform and the development of the ornate style; visual evidence for the emergence of the ornate style; discussion of the substantial if problematic role of women; the use of gold and silk vestments to claim status for the entire clerical order; and twelfth-century critiques of ornate clothing in relation to assessments of lordship. A useful glossary of terms, including illustrations, precedes the bibliography.