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Writing Demetrias: Ascetic Logic in Ancient Christianity

Church history, 2000-12, Vol.69 (4), p.719-748 [Peer Reviewed Journal]

Copyright © American Society of Church History 2000 ;Copyright 2000 The American Society of Church History ;2001 INIST-CNRS ;COPYRIGHT 2000 American Society of Church History ;Copyright American Society of Church History Dec 2000 ;ISSN: 0009-6407 ;EISSN: 1755-2613 ;DOI: 10.2307/3169329 ;CODEN: CHHIBV

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  • Title:
    Writing Demetrias: Ascetic Logic in Ancient Christianity
  • Author: Jacobs, Andrew S.
  • Subjects: Apostolic letters ; Aristocracy ; Asceticism ; Christian history ; Christianity ; Christianity : 4th-6th century. West ; Demetrias ; Early christianity (1st-6th century) ; History and sciences of religions ; Literary criticism ; Logic ; Men ; Mothers ; Nobility ; Sacred texts ; Spirituality ; Theology ; Women
  • Is Part Of: Church history, 2000-12, Vol.69 (4), p.719-748
  • Description: In his influential discussion of early Christian ascetic renunciation, Peter Brown announced that “Christian men used women ‘to think with’ in order to verbalize their own nagging concern with the stance that the Church should take with the world.” Brown's statement encapsulates the particular difficulties facing students of the history of women in the early Christian period. The most basic difficulty is that we possess very few texts by women from this period until well into the Middle Ages. We can point to the diary of the third-century martyr Perpetua, the complex and recondite Vergilian and Homeric centos (“stitch-verses”) of the aristocrat Proba and the empress Eudocia, and perhaps one or two other arguable examples. With a dearth of women's own voices, can historians be expected to reconstruct women's lives? This paucity of “first-person” texts is coupled with a more serious theoretical difficulty facing historians of all periods whose main “evidence” consists of literary and rhetorically informed texts. Scholars are much less confident today in our ability to peel back layers of male rhetoric and find the “real” woman concealed underneath. Brown's comment underscores this rhetorical skepticism by asking whether these texts are even “about” women at all. Others following Brown's lead have understood texts that are ostensibly to or about women as concerned primarily with issues of male authority and identity. In Brown's words, women were good “to think with,” but the subject of that “thought” was inevitably male. Despite these technical and theoretical difficulties, however, I do not think we are witnessing the final and absolute erasure of women from ancient Christian history.
  • Publisher: New York, USA: Cambridge University Press
  • Language: English
  • Identifier: ISSN: 0009-6407
    EISSN: 1755-2613
    DOI: 10.2307/3169329
    CODEN: CHHIBV
  • Source: Alma/SFX Local Collection
    ProQuest Central
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