Holy Women, Holy Words: Early Christain Women, Social History, and the "Linguistic Turn"

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 1998 papers

Abstract

Holy Women, Holy Words: Early Christian Women, Social History, and the “Linguistic Turn” Elizabeth A. Clark (bio) It is a striking—and disturbing—fact that historians can locate no feminine equivalent of Peter Brown’s “holy man.” To be sure, Susan Ashbrook Harvey and Sebastian Brock named their book of translations Holy Women of the Syrian Orient, 1 yet an inspection of its contents suggests that most “holy women” described in these texts were martyrs (with extra luck, dying as virgins); 2 none appears to function as the precise female counterpart to the “holy men” described by Brown. In addition to martyrs such as these, we hear much in early Christian literature of women ascetics—but again, they do not function as “holy men.” Early Christian sources concerning asceticism vary in the denseness of their coverage of women, from “none” in the Historia monachorum, 3 to [End Page 413] “nearly none” in Theodoret’s History of the Monks of Syria, 4 to “some” in the Apophthegmata patrum, 5 to “considerable” in Palladius’ Lausiac History. 6 The fullest treatment of women, however, lies in the letters to and memorials of women by writers such as Jerome, 7 and in the full-blown vitae of women such as Olympias, Macrina, Melania the Younger, and Syncletica. 8 Yet, oddly, the fuller the accounts of such early Christian “holy women,” the less they look like Peter Brown’s “holy men.” The women about whom vitae are composed are not those who illustrate the social mobility or “achieved status” of Brown’s “holy men”; 9 their status rather derives from their vast inherited wealth and social position, whose prestige they carry into monastic life. 10 It is their aristocratic status that renders them fearless to confront threatening governors and coercive emperors, as the cases of Melania the Elder and Olympias suggest. 11 The patronage they exercise is not rural, as is that of so many “holy men”: 12 [End Page 414] the women are largely identified with cities and towns—Constantinople, Jerusalem, Rome, Bethlehem. 13 Nor is their patronage of the sort that Brown describes (resolving disputes, forwarding lawsuits, helping villagers to meet tax demands). 14 Rather, they appear to follow older, urban-oriented models of patronage—except that their gifts are now for establishing churches and monasteries, not for the erection of statues and civic buildings, or the endowment of clubs and guilds. 15 Moreover, they are not generally recorded as having worked miracles during their lifetimes, as are “holy men”: Gregory of Nyssa adds a few such miracles to the end of his Vita Macrinae, 16 while feats paltry in both kind and number are reported in the Latin version of the Life of Melania the Younger. 17 After her death, Olympias’ body is said to work miracles, 18 but we hear of none during her lifetime. Nor are Jerome’s women miracle-workers. The “holy women of the Syrian Orient” described by Ashbrook Harvey and Brock occasionally elicit a miraculous event by their mere presence, 19 but such deeds are said to occur “not by her will or by her word,” 20 in contrast to the intentional cures, exorcisms, and other wondrous feats worked by Brown’s “holy men.” Women may be said to have Christ “in” them, since as baptized Christians they have “put on [End Page 415] Christ” (Gal 3.27), 21 but it is not said that Christ is “made accessible” through them, as it is for Brown’s “holy men”: 22 “gender-bending,” although prevalent in ascetic literature, did not, apparently, stretch this far. Thus the women whom we might have imagined as the female counterparts of Brown’s “holy men” in fact are not. Yet there is, I think, a further reason why our confidence regarding the recovery of “holy women” is shaken. It is the fullest, most detailed, sources pertaining to women ascetics that give us the greatest pause. These texts are the most “literary,” the most rhetorically constructed, and hence, I shall suggest, should arouse the most hermeneutical suspicion. Far from uncovering “the women themselves,” we encounter literary set pieces by male authors. The very “literariness” of these texts constitutes the first theoretical problem I...

Related Papers

• → The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory and Tradition(2004)80 cited
• → Asceticism(2009)11 cited
• → The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (review)(1999)
• → Unravelling the Threads: The Origins of Women's Asceticism in the Earliest Christian Communities(1997)
• ON IMAM GHAZALIS ASCETICISM APPROACH IN ÝHYA-U ULUMÝD-DÝN(2015)