Women and Modesty in Late Antiquity

by Kate Wilkinson

This book offers a fresh approach to some of the most studied documents relating to Christian female asceticism in the Roman era. Focusing on the letters of advice to the women of the noble Anicia family, Kate Wilkinson argues that conventional descriptions of feminine modesty can reveal spaces of agency and self-formation in early Christian women's lives. She uses comparative data from contemporary ethnographic studies of Muslim, Hindu, and indigenous Pakistani women to draw out the possibilities inherent in codes of modesty. Her analysis also draws on performance studies for close readings of Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Pelagius. The book begins by locating itself within the complex terrain of feminist historiography, and then addresses three main modes of modest behavior - dress, domesticity and silence. Finally, it addresses the theme of false modesty and explores women's agency in light of Augustinian and Pelagian conceptions of choice.

184 pages, Paperback

First published March 18, 2015

Reviews

[Wouter Seijsener · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think at the moment the best book on Women in Late Antiquity. Her approach on researching female agency is worth the attention.

[Amy Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kate Wilkinson focuses on the women of the famous Anicii family and the virtue of modesty in Late Antiquity. Considering the misunderstanding and redefinition this term has undergone, especially since the Victorian era, she has her work cut out for her. Of course, modesty is not about the extent of coverage a bathing suit offers, it is a social virtue that is less about constraint by others or of self-restraint but about performing self-control as public virtue. Generally modesty is understood as a social virtue that enforces the status quo and that restricts women, but it can also open avenues for the demonstration of women's agency.

Wilkinson draws upon ethnographic analyses of contemporary women, that of tribal Kalasha women from the Hindu Kush and the Muslim Pakistani women (specifically how they dress and respond to the camera), in order to find analogies to help us understand ancient Christians. Often the historical distance is uneasily bridged since ascetic practice and modesty are not cultural norms in modern Western Christianity. Thus it is too easy to fall into stereotypes or breeze over the detail of seemingly mundane cultural performance as of minor importance. What Wilkinson demonstrates is that women are constantly negotiating their social space and communicating their position/message depending on audience or situation. The parallels she draws are illuminating for the study of late antique women. Wilkinson proves that substantial ethnographic engagement is a very effective strategy for exploring the self-representation and self-formation of early Christian women. Hopefully this methodology will be used more frequently in the future.

In addition, Wilkinson helps us correct our assumptive mapping of the modern understanding of agency as autonomy onto women in late Antiquity. The ancient world stressed community over the individual and that community was always shifting and reinterpreting itself. Wilkinson helps us to resist the urge to see Christian women as primarily the resistance to the status quo. The cultural norms were more fluid than it might seem and women were constantly deciding how to manage and express competing and even at times contradictory cultural values. Women's agency was indeed at work in the social construction of gender in society but we have to be mindful of how we articulate that agency.

Kate Wilkinson's fantastic work builds upon the excellent critical and textual work on early Christian women, advancements in socio-historical approaches, and the sharpening of feminist methodologies. This book is indicative of the high quality of tools available for research on women in early Christianity and utilizes them well.

[nerd twothousand · Rating 1 out of 5]

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