Women and Asceticism in Late Antiquity: The Refusal of Status and Gender

Abstract

This chapter takes one kind of historical approach to the question of origins and meanings: it seeks to consider late antique asceticism in relation to a social context which in recent years. It asks what ascetics were reacting against or refusing, what signals their lifestyles sent within a particular cultural range, whether late antique asceticism was an intensification of familiar practices, or a radical break from them. Women’s asceticism, as practiced in late antiquity, is startling now because it is so extreme a rejection of family ties and female identity; and it was startling then simply because women did it. The stories of martyrs were read to the crowds who came to their shrines on their feast days. It is difficult, now, to know how to read passiones, because it seems impossible that human beings endured such things undismayed, or even that other human beings could believe they had done so.

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