Despite the existence of specific conciliar canons forbidding women to wear male clothing for the purpose of asceticism, it is interesting to note how many Vitae of cross-dressing saints circulated freely between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and how quickly they became objects of devotion in both the East and the West.
Comparing several Latin and Greek sources, such as canonical, hagiographical, and patristic ones, the phenomenon of the gender metamorphosis will be investigated by means of a historical-semantic approach. The Greek verbs enduo and metaballo, which indicate dressing up in the sources and the Latin words induo and vestio, will be given particular attention.
