It is not usual to crack a spine on a new book, eagerly anticipated, and be so arrested by the first sentence. ‘Feminist historians of early Christianity have long noted that early Christian men thought with and about gender violence a great deal in formative years of the early Christian movement.’ (1) This was a sentence that proved to be both a challenge and an accelerant in reviewing this book, highlighting the divisions in how people who are most preoccupied in thinking about the past do it in categories that can operate hierarchically as well as in isolation. Language here is important, and more than a technicality to be observed for accuracy. To use a term like ‘gender violence’ signifies that a range of harmful behaviours like rape, sexual harassment, coercion, forced movement, and domestic abuse are in fact connected with one another. Gendered violence operates as a pattern of behaviours and harms, and not as a series of unfortunate events that coincidentally harm an individual who happens to be part of an oppressed group. Whilst feminist historians of early Christianity have indeed paid attention to forms of gendered violence such as femicide or sexual violence, it is only more recently that scholars have explicitly centred gendered violence as a critical framework. Today as in the past, victims and survivors experience a pattern, and perpetrators depend on society seeing only a moment. Fortunately, historians are uniquely trained not only to see moments, instead identifying broader trends and changes over time and making sense of them. The critical study of gendered violence in the past, then, is fertile ground for those who can see the network and not just the nodes. Barry’s excellent book is located at the forefront of this approach and makes an important contribution to the critical reframing of the ancient world that foregrounds gender, violence, and intersectional oppression.
Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination is determined by a strong ethical approach that confronts the normalisation of gendered violence in foundational Christian texts and theological arguments by modern scholarship (1). Like other feminist historians before her, Barry has drawn a line, refusing to perpetuate ideologies about women and gender that are actively harmful: ‘How scholars confront violence, and the histories of structural racism and colonialism, is important. It is not enough to raise one’s hands in defeat’ (21).[1] It is a testament to Barry’s careful scholarship that does not polarise or recriminate; instead she corrects traditional readings and re-examines early Christian texts by drawing on feminist and womanist scholarship. Barry’s focus is not on how to do it badly, but how to do it well. The Introduction is heady with a promising set of strategies that include transgressing disciplinary boundaries, challenging periodisation, highlighting the gravitational pull of male scholarship, and established canons of literature, recentring overlooked women scholars in the study of late antiquity and patristics, and positioning women, gender and sexuality as central to a proper understanding of an early Christianity firmly within the Greco-Roman world: ‘The sources … read comparatively, piece together a social world in which women not only existed but also shaped new historical timelines.’ (5) This signposting at the beginning of the book is not hyperbolic, and Barry more than meets her promises to the reader.
Barry’s style of analysis is to demonstrate rather than explicate; Chapter One is not delayed with a definition of gendered violence, and heads straight into textual analysis. Given her previous scholarship, it is not surprising that much of Chapter One features Athanasius, exploring how women’s experiences of sexual violence were reassembled to centre a male hero and his suffering in theological battles over Christian orthodoxy.[2] Athanasius used Judges 19 to defend himself against heterodoxy, and similarly Ps.-Martyrius used Jezebel (Kings 1 and 2) to reframe the death of John Chrysostom as a biblical story brought to life. As the conclusion to Chapter One notes, ‘Gendered bodies were not just used to think with but also pulled apart, reassembled, and put on display to recover male reputations.’ (54) Chapter Two (‘Forgotten Bodies’) shifts focus more onto women’s bodies and the erasure of their violent experiences, particularly in the writings of Augustine. Barry argues convincingly that Augustine built a legacy of Christian supremacy on the remains of unnamed women, a rhetorical strategy that was indicative of larger trends in the late ancient Christian imagination. Chapter 3 (‘Impossible Bodies’) foregrounds the inherent distrust of the female body, the instability of virginity, and the impossible standards demanded of holy women. Barry shows how sexual violence was a repeated gendered narrative in the making of a female saint’s life; even Mary, the Mother of God, was not exempt from male suspicion and her perpetual virginity was repeatedly tested.
Chapters Four, Five, Six, and Seven shift focus from female bodies to male dreams, or more specifically, male fantasies. Chapter Four (‘Revenge Fantasies’) examines the sexualised revenge fantasy of the hagiographer, with disease and suffering (lots of worms!) functioning as a gendered punishment from God. Violence underlies ascetic Christian perfection, retribution, and heterodoxy, and that violence is distinctly gendered – it means different things for men and for women, as shown through the Life of Simeon the Stylite and Syncletica of Alexandria. Flesh-eating worms that fall from the body of Simeon are pearls, but on the body of a female saint, a worm is just a worm. Chapter Four ends ‘overwhelmed by the presence of worms, which etched a gruesome narrative of suffering, echoing divine wrath and revenge.’ (125) Chapter Five, ‘(Bad) Romantic Fantasies’, concentrates on sexual violence and domestic abuse in hagiographical literature about women, beginning with Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina, and then considering Gerontius’s Life of Melania the Younger and Chariton’s Callirhoe. The Chapter reveals how the voyeuristic hagiographer foregrounded female vulnerability and a perception of continuous sexual availability that kept the threat of rape ever present for women. Saintly women were ‘constantly subjected to the excessive and uncontrollable desires of men, with bloody outcomes.’ (138-9) Barry ends the Chapter at a ‘disquieting crossroads’, concluding that sexual violence against women was a virtuous and expected outcome of the Christian life for women; rape and torture was glorified, if not sanctified, in hagiographical narratives.
Chapter Six (‘Dreams of Mothers’) turns away from male violence towards a resistance reading of the dreams of women, building on the work of Mitzi J. Smith to show how dreaming mothers can upend the male hagiographical fantasy.[3] Again, the evidence this chapter considers is wide-ranging, including the apocryphal Book of Susannah, the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, the Protoevangelium of James, the Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Life of Macrina again. The final Chapter, ‘Nightmares of Fathers’, repositions the monstrous from the raped, dead, and dismembered bodies of abused women to the male heroes who preserved their own reputations and served their own agendas through such violence. Feminist horror theory features productively to offer empowerment to women and to invert male fantasies of violence, particularly in the Life of Mary of Egypt. Barry argues that if we read hagiography as horror, a version of ancient nightmare rather than beatific dream, the monstrous emerges in surprising ways: the true monster is not the demonic phantom but the predatory and voyeuristic male who demands a narrative of sexual dominance for his own pleasure.
In some respects, the only criticism a reviewer could have with Gender Violence in Late Antiquity is that there was not more of it. There were moments when the book raised evidence and arguments that left the opportunity for further development untaken, such as the consequences now for the sanctification of gendered violence in the early Christian imagination, and sometimes essential discussion was relegated to footnotes.[4] The book is rich in the range of concepts and theories Barry was able to draw in, but it was surprising that misogyny and its intersection with gendered violence was not discussed. The sweeping and really exciting potential of gendered violence as a critical framework means that it is perhaps easy to overestimate what the book can reasonably be expected to cover. Barry’s path-breaking contribution comes at the beginning of a new approach to the ancient past, and we impatiently await more from her on this topic, and to seeing the field expand with new contributions and dynamic voices.[5]
Notes
[1] For example, Celene Lillie argues that the evasion of sexual violence in modern scholarship is another way of perpetuating the structures and systems that promote, reward, and tolerate sexual violence. The Rape of Eve: The Transformation of Roman Ideology in Three Early Christian Retellings of Genesis (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2018) 12.
[2] Jennifer Barry, Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019).
[3] Mitzi J. Smith, Womanist Sass and Talk Back: Social (In)Justice, Intersectionality, and Biblical Interpretation (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2018).
[4] For example: 64 fn. 24; 75 fn. 60; and 133 fn. 18.
[5] Other significant contributions include: Caroline Blyth, Emily Colgan, and Katie B. Edwards (eds), Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion. Biblical Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2018); Christy Cobb and Eric Vanden Eykel (eds), Sex, Violence, and Early Christian Texts (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022).