Shoes, Slippers, and Sandals

This edited volume groups research on the significance of ancient feet and footwear, much of which was presented, discussed and reviewed at the conference: Shoes, Slippers and Sandals: Feet and Footwear in Antiquity, held at Newcastle University and the Great North Museum from 29 June–1 July 2015.Ancient dress and adornment have received significant consideration in recent scholarship, though, strikingly, feet and footwear have featured relatively little in this discussion. This volume aims to rectify this imbalance through its fifteen chapters covering a wide range of aspects associated with feet and footwear in classical antiquity. Contributions are grouped under four headings: ‘Envisaging footwear’, ‘Following footprints’, ‘One from a pair’ and ‘Between representation and reality’, reflecting the broad range and interdisciplinary nature of the approaches undertaken.

"This innovative volume is a welcome addition to studies on ancient dress, an exciting field of growing importance. The editors have collected a number of excellent essays on the significance of feet and footwear in archaeological, art historical and literary contexts from ancient Greece and Rome, on such diverse topics as footwear at the symposium, shoemakers in ancient society, monosandalism, shoes on Attic vases, brooches in the shape of shoes from Roman Britain, and podiatric shoes from Vindolanda. A fresh look at the evidence for ancient shoes, this important new book will be invaluable for historians of clothing, art, and social history, as well as those interested in the history of dress more generally."- Kelly Olson, University of Western Ontario, Canada"The chapter bibliographies in this volume are a major contribution to the field, and the abundance of reference material (both material culture and literary works) will greatly enrich future studies ... [this volume is] informative, innovative, and competently done. Drawing upon the latest modern studies, and with preceptive use of ancient sources, these scholars offer numerous insights which invite their readers onto scholarly ground that has until recently been mostly untrodden."- Daniel B. Levine, University of Arkansas, USA, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2019

Sadie Pickup is currently a lecturer at the University of Reading, UK, having previously taught at Christie’s Education, London/University of Glasgow, UK. She has also worked at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK. She completed her DPhil in Classical Archaeology at Oxford in 2012 and has since published on this subject. She co-edited Brill’s Companion to Aphrodite (2010) and was lead author for Volume 30 of the Corpus of Cypriote Antiquities series: Cypriote Antiquities in Reading, The Ure Museum at the University of Reading and the Reading Museum (Reading Borough Council), published in 2015. Her book: The Life and Afterlife of the Knidian Aphrodite: From Ancient to Modern, is forthcoming.Sally Waite is a lecturer in Greek Art and Archaeology at Newcastle University, UK. She has worked extensively with the Shefton Collection of Greek and Etruscan Archaeology in the Great North Museum, UK, and is joint editor of On the Fascination of Objects: Greek and Etruscan Art in the Shefton Collection (2016). Her research is primarily on Attic red-figure pottery and she has a particular interest in the history of collecting. She has published on the Kent Collection: Acquiring Antiquity: Greek and Cypriot Pottery from the Harrogate Collection (2014) and ‘Ancient art in a museum context: the Kent Collection in Harrogate’ in Greek Art in Context edited by Diana Rodríguez Pérez (Routledge 2017).