Daily martyrdom and the suffering feminine body: discourses of female asceticism in late antique and early medieval Christianity

Smith, Laura (2024). Daily martyrdom and the suffering feminine body: discourses of female asceticism in late antique and early medieval Christianity. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Early Christian narrative demonstrates the inextricability of body and text. Christian theology and doctrine of the early church was written on and through bodies – the body of Christ, of Mary, of the tortured, mutilated bodies of the martyrs, on the emaciated bodies of ascetics and the continent bodies of virgins. Within these narratives, women’s bodies feature heavily.

Body narratives are rife throughout the literature of the early church, and these linguistic representations of bodies; their actions, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts are also embedded in authorial corporal understanding, reflecting their writers’ world view and cultural and theological understanding. What is selected by the author, how stories are retold, and how this is communicated to the reader are mediated through the body and through the author’s understanding of the body that is depicted. Somatic representations in ancient literature therefore provide an important avenue through which to explore not only early Christian understanding of corporeality, gender and sexuality, but also social, cultural and theological meanings that are inscribed on the bodies to whom we have access.

This thesis seeks to explore the narrative articulation of the female body, focusing on the textual commemoration of corporeal suffering of female ascetics in late antique Christian hagiography. It considers the rhetorical, theological, didactic and social uses of the suffering female body, by reconsidering these sources as corporeal performances interwoven within other existing discourses and interrogates them through the lens of gender and sexuality, illness and disability, and the history of emotions. In so doing, this thesis will shed new light not only on the accounts of the hagiographic Lives examined in this study, but also male and female corporeality, early Christian understandings of gender and sexuality, and eschatological thought.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):