Sanctae Famulae Dei: Towards a Reading of Augustine's Female Martyrs

Augustine of Hippo’s depictions of female martyrs have eluded scholarly attention despite recent interest in his attitudes towards women and his involvement with the cult of the martyrs. The present thesis addresses this oversight by resituating Augustine’s representations of female martyrs within the corpus of his works. It shows how Augustine’s representations of female martyrs are not simple auxiliary illustrations or marginal notes tangential to his main concerns, but rather they are complex images that reveal a depth of thought in their construction and employment, and which, therefore, deserve our attention in their own right. Perceiving the female martyrs within the wider context of his life, his moral and theological writings, and his pastoral ministry, this study explores how Augustine used the female martyrs to contemplate, articulate, and communicate theological beliefs, ecclesiological concerns, eschatological hopes, and moral teachings

Love's calling : how eroticism encourages religious intentions in "Joseph and Aseneth" and the "Æthiopika"

Ce mémoire s’intéresse à l’emploi de l’érotisme et de l’amour comme outils littéraires dans deux romans de l’Antiquité. Le texte principal est un écrit dérivé de la Torah intitulé Joseph et Aséneth. Le second est le roman grec d’Héliodore d’Émèse, Les Éthiopiques. Puisque tout auteur, peu importe sa foi, avait une éducation hellénique semblable, on retrouve des motifs similaires dont les détails se distinguent et les buts sont aux antipodes dans ces textes. Dans le cas de cette recherche, il s’agit de deux oeuvres du genre romanesque écrites en grec qui emploient chacune une histoire romantique à des fins édifiantes. Les buts de cette analyse sont triples. Ce travail cherche à montrer que Joseph et Aseneth a droit au titre de « roman grec, » de qualifier les expériences religieuses présentées dans ces oeuvres et de participer au débat sur la datation de Joseph et Aseneth par une étude comparée. Cette recherche se divise en trois sections. D’abord, le topos bien connu des romans a été analysé : la maladie d’amour. Dans les deux cas, le coup de foudre et la maladie émotionnelle qui s’en suit ont été dévoilés comme moteur important de la trame narrative, ainsi qu’une manière d’introduire des thèmes religieux ou philosophiques. En second lieu, les paroles des personnages au sujet de l’amour et le mariage ont été considérées. Puisque les protagonistes refusent le mariage initialement, les raisons données pour ce refus ont été révélatrices encore une fois de soucis sociaux, soit religieux, soit politiques. En dernier lieu, la relation entre le couple romantique et les dieux présents dans ces récits a été analysée. Les deux romans témoignent de la croyance contemporaine du grand rôle des dieux dans la vie des humains. Cette implication divine dans la vie mortelle s’est manifestée de manières différentes, car elle relève des buts divergents des deux romans. Le parallèle qui se présente est un lien individuel avec les dieux qui est évident dans les romans d’amour.This thesis examines the use of eroticism and love as literary devices in two ancient novels. The primary text analysed is a work derived from the Torah entitled Joseph and Aseneth. The second piece is the Æthiopika, the romance written by Heliodorus of Emesa. Despite their divergent backgrounds, all authors received a similar Hellenic education, and motifs bearing striking similarities are thus found in these narratives of antithetical purposes. Moreover, both of these texts are novels, were written in Greek, and exploit romance in order to edify their public. This thesis has three purposes. It aims to show that Joseph and Aseneth is deserving of classification as a Greek romance, to qualify the religious experiences had by the characters, and to contribute to the discussion of dating of Joseph and Aseneth by this comparative study. A tripartite analysis is used in this research. To begin with, the well known romantic trope of lovesickness is analysed. In both cases, the use of love at first sight and the emotional illness that follows are shown to be not merely genre requirements, but motors of the plot, as well as a means by which an author can introduce either religious or philosophical elements. The second section takes up speech pertaining to love and romance. As protagonists from both novels initially refuse matrimony, the language regarding these refusals is highly informative of social anxieties, particularly political or religious concerns, regarding marriage. Lastly, the relationship between the romantic couple and the gods present in their narrative is considered. The two novels display the historically appropriate understanding that the gods intervene in the private lives of mortals. The fashions and reasons for which they do so is different in each story, a convergence stemming from the purposes of these two works. Parallels can be drawn, however, for both narratives display a shift from institutional to personal religion, through the individual relationships of characters with divinities

Wif, Cwen, Ides: Cultural Constructions of Femininity in Early Medieval England

In Old English literature, women often appear in recognizable roles like queen, peaceweaver, mother, and mourner. These figures serve as cultural signifiers through whom texts articulate, create, and reinforce societal beliefs. However, the positions, ideals, and expectations ascribed to these female figures are often contradictory. In order to explore the multiple and sometimes nebulous definitions of femininity in early medieval England, this dissertation approaches gender through paradox and intersection. The paradoxical roles and expectations at play in early English texts reveal that femininity cannot be understood within the concept of gender alone, but within frameworks of gender and: that is, models which contextualize gender in relation to other categories of social difference. Intersectionality provides a framework for understanding the various simultaneous positions that an individual occupies in relation to structures of power. This project takes an intersectional approach, leveraging feminist, queer, and transgender methodologies to illuminate a multifaceted portrait of medieval gender beyond a superficial binary arrangement, showing how seemingly coherent and singular categories like “man” and “woman” are socially constructed and historically contingent, then and now. Such observations in turn allow us to reexamine previous critical assumptions and to reach more nuanced understandings of femininity in early medieval England

Virginity matters: power and ambiguity in the attraction of the Virgin Mary

This thesis seeks to account for virginity as the source of Mary's power to attract. The point of departure is the syncretistic culture of the classical world. Here, patristic use of Old Testament typology recognises the distinctive work of grace in Mary's virginity, thus allowing it to become the determining quality by which her experience is subsequently perceived and universalised. The thesis divides its exploration into the three categories by which Mary is portrayed in the gospels - woman, spouse, mother - concluding its investigation with the end of the nineteenth century and its new understanding of human identity in gender and sexuality. In each category the thesis attempts to identify ways in which the attraction of virginity has functioned through ambiguity (Mary as virgin and mother, mother and spouse of her son) as a positive quality of potency and freedom, rather than as a strictly biological human condition with negative association in contemporary culture. In order to assess the extent of Mary's attraction in periods that lacked the modern forms of articulating self-awareness, the thesis has considered the fabric of devotional practice in religious texts, art, drama and ritual, seeking to allow the perceptions of earlier periods of history (a medium in itself) to challenge our own. As expressions of attraction to Mary, these media have yielded an insight into the power of virginity as a statement of paradisal, heavenly life accessed by grace through male and female human experience. They have also shown virginity to be a source of power that can be exploited for political ends. Finally, the thesis suggests that the power of Mary's virginity has been subversive and liberating in Church and society, thus indicating its neglected significance as a statement about the ambiguity of our nature as human, gendered, and sexual beings

Virgin martyrs in pre-modern England: emulation, appropriation, and refashioning

This dissertation explores literary representations of virgin martyrs in England from the thirteenth century into the reign of Charles I. Previous studies have identified the social significance of the literary virgin martyrs but, viewing them as a specifically medieval phenomenon, have traced them only as far as the fifteenth century. My project takes up post-Reformation discussions and representations of virgin martyrs, from Reginald Scot's suggestion in The Discoverie of Witchcraft that St. Cecilia's angel is a witch's familiar, to the staging of St. Dorothea as a prop of religious transition in Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger's The Virgin Martyr. I demonstrate that the appropriation and re-fashioning of the virgin martyr merges with the post-Reformation project of repudiating the Catholic past and constructing a new national and religious identity. Joining the scholarly movement that revises the argument of an impassable divide between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, I contend that the transformations of this popular figure point to the ongoing negotiations of literary models available to female audiences and serve as a point of access to issues of periodization and cultural self-definition. Exploring the conjunction in Renaissance texts between historiographical anxiety and the fear of the female miracle worker, I argue that the Protestant unease directed at this figure has its origins in the tension, building throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth century, between the patristic ideal of the silent and hidden holy virgin and the dynamic revision of her in the South English Legendary, an extensively copied thirteenth-century collection of vernacular saints' lives. This dissertation explores the subversive conduct models offered by the virgin martyr to the female audience, with a specific focus on Margery Kempe, and the progressive revision of the female martyr model by numerous male writers. A close reading of several early modern plays, including William Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI and Pericles, identifies the virgin martyr as the focal point for coming to terms with the persistent influence of the Catholic past on the newly Protestant nation

A theological exploration of the shape of life and death in dialogue with the biographical works of Gregory of Nyssa

In this thesis I investigate Gregory of Nyssa’s doctrine of the spiritual ascent of epektasis in order to uncover a theological vision of progress through the passage of a human life. I argue that how such progress is construed yields vivid ethical implications for how ageing and dying at the end of life can be experienced and perceived. In the course of making this argument, three additional projects are developed. First, primary use is made of Gregory’s under-studied biographical works, and a proof of their relevance to his doctrinal thought and richness as ethical sources offered. Second, three distinctively ‘Nyssen’ virtuous practices are analyzed and their relation to Gregory’s doctrinal positions clarified; one practice in particular, forgiving, having received scarce attention in the literature thus far. Third, in positing that practice throughout life can shape perceptions of life’s end, a challenge is posed to recent ethical studies insistent on treating the end of life as its own siphoned off frontier without reference to a whole picture of living. The thesis engages, then, with the ethical implications of theological anthropology, contributing both to the study of Gregory of Nyssa and to contemporary debate pertaining to questions of ageing and dying.Funded by a Trinity College Studentshi

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

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

Harmful traditional practices in three countries of South Asia : culture, human rights and violence against women

This study documents and analyses the manner in which harmful traditional and cultural practices contribute to violence against women in the three South Asian countries of Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The study uses a human rights framework to determine whether traditional and cultural practices are harmful and constitute violence against women. The universality and indivisibility of women&rsquo;s human rights and the norm of equality and non-discrimination as set out in international human rights standards provide the basis for identifying those practices which can be described as both harmful and contributing to violence against women.</p