Let's Hear It For the Girls
A wonderful part of PhD work is having experts direct me to resources I never knew existed. This week I received via Inter Library Loan a book one of my advisers recommended in a three-volume series titled Women Writing in Latin. I know that sounds boring as rip, but hang with me a sec, because it I found it fascinating.
The volume that pertains to my work is the first in the series,
Writing Latin in Roman Antiquity, Late Antiquity, and the Early Christian Era. And I read it from cover to cover today. In it I found writings from women in the first and second centuries BC and AD, three of whom were Christ-followers.
The first was Proba, a woman well versed in the poetry of Virgil so she mixed his phrases and style with Genesis to create a new epic poem called a canto about the creation of humans and the Fall. Gorgeous stuff.
Second I read the
journal of Perpetua (in translation) about a young mother who was martyred with her friend Felicity. I was familiar with their story, but I had never read the entire account in Perpetua's own words. And it is some inspiring, make-you-gulp stuff. Such courage!
The author of
A Lost Tradition, in writing about Perpetua, said, "While one can debate various positions about Christianity's effect on the social standing of women in the Roman Empire, unquestionably it released previously untapped well-springs of energy among women to whom the Gospel was preached. Of the writings which we possess or even know about from women in the Roman Empire after the days of Augustus, only some of the poetry of Sulpicia is extant; all the other works are by Christian women."
In other words we would have almost nothing from women (period!) without Christians' writings. And here's an additional observation by another historian: "Perpetua's assumption of leadership within her group exemplifies one of the aspects of Christianity that particularly attracted women. Traditionally in the Mediterranean cultures that formed the Roman Empire, women were expected to confine themselves to the maintenance of their home and family life and engage very little in public life... In the itinerant ministry of Jesus, however, and in the early church, women played prominent roles.... Early Christian communities, moreover, not only valued women generally as leaders in the church, but also esteemed their expression of ideas whether in oral or written form. As God was believed to speak to both sexes, both men and women could, and did, prophesy in church."
The third woman recounted her pilgrimage to holy sites from her home to Jerusalem and then Asia Minor (Turkey).
What did these documents tell me? They suggested once again that early understandings of sex roles in Christendom liberated women in the best sense of the word. Only after the church moved from homes to buildings and added a clear clergy/laity divide (in the century after Perpetua) do we see a shift toward more negative views about women and what they could and couldn't do.