1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910781882503321

Autore

Coon Lynda L

Titolo

Sacred fictions : holy women and hagiography in late antiquity / / Lynda L. Coon

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Philadelphia : , : University of Pennsylvania Press, , 1997

©1997

ISBN

1-283-21155-6

9786613211552

0-8122-0167-1

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xxiii, 228 pages) : illustrations

Collana

The Middle Ages series

Disciplina

270/.082

Soggetti

Women in Christianity - History - Early church, ca. 30-600

Women in Christianity - History - Middle Ages, 600-1500

Christian women saints - History and criticism

Christian hagiography - History - To 1500

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. [203]-219) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Hagiography and Sacred Models -- 2. Gender, Hagiography, and the Bible -- 3. The Rhetorical Uses of Clothing in the Lives of Sacred Males -- 4. God's Holy Harlots -- 5. “Through the Eye of a Needle” -- 6. Civilizing Merovingian Gaul -- Conclusion: Sacred Fictions -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries.Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk



on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.