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Sacred Bonding: Mothers and Daughters in Early Syriac Hagiography

Susan Ashbrook Harvey

The portrayal of mother-daughter relationships in Syriac hagiographical literature gives evidence that this family bond could be sustained in an ascetic context in ways particularly significant for women. The integration of asceticism into urban life, the institution of the Sons and Daughters of the Covenant, and the practical implications of understanding Christian faith as a literal betrothal to Christ were distinctive features of Syriac Christianity that allowed for a joining of familial and ascetic bonds. The situation allowed mothers and daughters to develop a social and religious space for their relationship, separate from that dictated by the responsibilities and obligations of patriarchal family organization. At the same time, the Christianization of the family may also have afforded women a mechanism by which mothers and daughters could forge a protection of their relationship not possible in traditional Greco-Roman families.

Syriac hagiographical literature from late antiquity presents a series of vivid and moving portraits of mothers and daughters. ¹ These literary images are arresting in part because family relationships between females are not commonly explored in literature of the Greco-Roman world. As the [End Page 27] considerable scholarly interest in the ancient family has shown, ² we know much more about fathers and daughters, or mothers and sons, than we do about mothers and daughters. ³ Furthermore, these portraits challenge the frequent assumption of scholars that hagiographical literature undermined the importance of biological family bonds by celebrating concepts of sanctity that seem to set ascetic piety over and against family devotion. Rejection of one's biological family for the family of faith (Mk 3:31­35; Lk 14:26) was a commonplace of early Christian hagiography. ⁴ The distinct ascetic tradition of Syriac Christianity, however, allowed a convergence of familial bonds and ascetic vocation in ways that may have proved especially significant for women. Syriac hagiography indicates that mothers and daughters could sustain their relationship in an ascetic context, in a manner affirming both devotion to God and a personal loyalty to one another of considerable emotional weight. ⁵

In this study I shall discuss five stories of mothers and daughters found in varying subgenres of Syriac hagiographical literature written during the [End Page 28] fifth and sixth centuries a.d. I will focus most extensively on the Edessan story of the poor widow Sophia and her daughter Euphemia in the romance, Euphemia and the Goth. This text presents a highly complex interaction of public and private issues with respect to Christian mothers and daughters; furthermore, it has received virtually no attention by scholars despite its narrative richness. ⁶ I will also treat the stories of the Najran noblewoman Ruhm martyred with her three daughters; the holy woman Euphemia of Amida and her daughter Maria; the legendary martyr Irene and her mother, a pagan queen; and the legendary nun and martyr Febronia and her spiritual mother (and biological aunt), the abbess Bryene. These five represent the major types or paradigms of the mother-daughter relationship that Syriac literature of the period sets forth, encompassing in the first three cases the biological family unit and in the last two, the spiritual (fictive) kinship patterns by which the Christian community redefined the traditional, ancient household. Laid out in this way, these five stories chart progressive degrees of Christianization within the late antique family. ⁷

At least two of these stories, those of Ruhm and Euphemia of Amida, are about historical women. Evenso, I will treat all five cases as literary documents exhibiting some historical features (true to the social context of their audience) but otherwise "fictionalized" in their portrayals of female characters. Syriac hagiography emerged as part of a highly cosmopolitan culture. It participated in the larger worldview of early Christian literature by placing value on the private sphere of the household as [End Page 29] well as public domains; such a view included granting visibility to women. ⁸ Yet the correlation of these literary portrayals with the lives of real women remains problematic. The writers of earlier Greek novels had portrayed their heroines as beautiful, chaste, and faithful unto death: images serving the patriarchal values of their culture. ⁹ So too are the women of late antique Christian literature portrayed in images suitable to the ecclesiastical establishment and its desired roles for women, ¹⁰ even where we may have a text of female authorship describing mothers and daughters. ¹¹ Ironically, the very literary patterns that make the mother-daughter relationship of interest to ancient hagiographers render these portrayals deeply suspect to the modern reader, regardless of whether these texts are historical or legendary in character. The religious dictates of hagiography's form determined the meaning it granted to the mother-daughter relationship.

My concern in this study is twofold. Firstly, utilizing some preliminary background on Syriac Christianity, I shall assess the historical data linking these stories to the social reality of the Syriac Christian community [End Page 30] that produced them. In whatever limited sense, we must seek to recover the lives of ancient women or we lose them utterly from the world of which they were a part. ¹² Secondly, I shall turn to the function the mother-daughter relationship served for the religious purposes of these texts. ¹³ Syriac hagiographical literature presents the mother-daughter relationship as one which could serve the highest religious calling even though it was a relationship between females of scant social authority, in a bond of political insignificance, and based on biological kinship. Such a view was possible only when the apparent contradiction in values between the life of the family and the life of perfect devotion to God--two lives often viewed as incompatible by late antique Christian society--could be adequately reconciled. Hence the final part of this study will examine under what conditions that reconciliation could be accomplished, at least in literary terms.

The latter consideration will require attention to the sociocultural rhetoric of these texts. ¹⁴ Hagiography often showed acute tension in its presentation of women. It portrayed holy women as conforming to established social norms even when their actions contradicted those norms. ¹⁵ To the extent that these stories were presented in an androcentric rhetoric reinforcing the social control of women, the women whose stories they purport to tell remain shielded from our view. Nonetheless, like the apocryphal Acts of the apostles, hagiographical stories were generated by and within the Christian community as a whole, men and women. ¹⁶ We do not know how women themselves would tell these stories of mothers and daughters. But we may be able to discern evidence within the texts of another voice, a resisting voice, separate from those of [End Page 31] their male authors. ¹⁷ That is, we may be able to see how these stories could have been understood differently by the women in their audience than by the men who told or also heard them. ¹⁸ That difference may be our only access to women's voices in this instance: it is a difference we must heed.

I. The Syriac Context

Three features of Syriac Christianity are especially important for understanding these presentations of mothers and daughters: firstly, the public location and orientation of Syrian ascetic practice, as opposed to withdrawal from the parish community into isolated groupings; secondly, the institution of the Sons and Daughters of the Convenant, which could be seen to uphold household and family relations and obligations, even in the context of an ascetic vocation; and thirdly, the manner by which the image of betrothal to Christ could carry social meaning for women within their families. Together these three features allowed the situation we shall see in our stories, whereby mothers and daughters could develop a social and religious space for their relationship, separate from that dictated by the responsibilities and obligations of patriarchal family organization. A brief background discussion will sketch this situation.

Christianity in the Syrian Orient was characterized from its inception by a rich understanding of asceticism as a mode of life devoted to God, demonstrated through service to the church community and lived out in village or city. ¹⁹ Celibacy or chastity in marriage; simplicity of food, clothing, and possessions; a life of prayer that included both study of Scripture and care for the poor, sick, and suffering--these were the active traits of early Syrian ascetic practice underlying the technical vocabulary later employed [End Page 32] in Syriac hagiography and monastic literature to convey sanctity. ²⁰ In the stories of mothers and daughters considered here, the notions of purity (dakyûtâ), modesty (nakpûtâ), and holiness or chastity in marriage (qaddîshûtâ) assume such practices. The most basic concept of Syrian asceticism, that of "singleness" (îîdyûtâ), connoted singleheartedness in devotion to God in addition to singleness in the sense of celibacy or, later, the life of a solitary; hence it was applied to a much broader scale of Christian activity than that of the strictly contemplative life. ²¹ It was not celibacy per se that determined sanctity in Syriac tradition. Ephrem Syrus could speak of consecrated virgins who would be shut out of paradise because their virginity had not been adorned with good works among the poor and suffering, while married women who instead proved to be the exemplars of the holy life would be let in, because their works among the needy expressed their perfect devotion to Christ. ²²

The rise of a separated monastic movement during the fourth century brought sharper distinctions between the lay and consecrated lives, accompanied by an increasing harshness of ascetic practice for which the Syrian Orient was famed. ²³ Nonetheless, the notion of ascetic service at the heart of the church community continued. Monasteries were located near to or even within villages and urban centers; holy men and women served as counselors, healers, and teachers for the laity. ²⁴ This development [End Page 33] did not displace the power of the earlier ideal. The image of an entire Christian community practicing a shared life of devotion continues to appear in Syriac literature of the fifth century. The Doctrine of Addai, for example, contemporary with Euphemia and the Goth and related to the same cycle of texts, portrays the earliest Christian community of Edessa as living the life of a monastic community, modest (nakpîn), holy (qaddîshîn), and pure (dakyîn). Their way of life (dûbbrê) is described in classic Syriac ascetic terminology, applied anachronistically to a city and its families. ²⁵ At about the same time, the Life of Rabbula was written, crediting this famed bishop and legislator of ecclesiastical and monastic life with turning the city of Edessa effectively into a monastery. It showed Rabbula reforming the conduct of laity, clergy, and consecrated religious so that their lives were seamlessly joined in one perfect life of devotion. ²⁶ In the sixth century, John of Ephesus (who wrote the account of Euphemia and Maria of Amida treated below) speaks of parents and children entering monasteries together, as well as of the exemplary ascetic lives, or "holiness," of families living and working at secular careers in the city of Amida. ²⁷ Thus the notion of asceticism as necessarily rooted in the heart of the Christian community, and as appropriate to its familial context and its urban location remained prominent. It is this notion that the stories of mothers and daughters considered here explicitly convey.

Again, Syrian Christianity was distinct for its lay order of the Sons and [End Page 34] Daughters of the Covenant (Bnay and Bnat Qymâ). ²⁸ Emerging by the third century, this order fulfilled the ideal of asceticism within the church community. These men and women took vows of poverty and chastity, lived in separate households with one another or with their parents, and worked in the service of priest or bishop. The rise of the monastic movement did not replace the work of these Covenanters, whose office survived at least into the tenth century. Rather, their identity as consecrated laity became more clearly defined as a bridge between lay and monastic communities. ²⁹

None of the mothers or daughters in the stories under discussion are identified as Daughters of the Covenant. Certain aspects of that office, however, provided an immediate social context for the situations described in our texts. Daughters of the Covenant were allowed to live in households together or with their mothers, thereby providing a respectable model for mothers and daughters living alone with one another. ³⁰ Further, the chanting of psalms and sacred hymns was a prayer ministry especially assigned to the Daughters of the Covenant and safeguarded in the Rabbula Canons, ³¹ setting a precedent for the type of prayer life followed by the women in several of our stories. The Daughters of the Covenant serving the urban parishes of late antiquity stand as the backdrop for our stories by establishing a situation in which women could pursue an ascetic vocation separated from men but not from other women of their family, located in a city household rather than in a convent outside, and practicing a recognizable vocation of prayer.

Finally, Syriac Christianity had long cherished the image of Christ as [End Page 35] the Heavenly Bridegroom to whom the believer was betrothed. ³² In early Syriac Christianity, this was the most prevalent and powerful image for the believer. ³³ It contributed substantially to the understanding of celibacy as the ideal for all Christians, not because of a dualistic devaluation of the body but because of the devotion appropriate to a betrothal relationship. It is an image used in four of the five texts discussed below, as a means for justifying women's religious behavior that might contradict social convention. In our texts, this image allowed a mother to safeguard religious choices for her daughter (betrothed to her heavenly Bridegroom) in terms that upheld the social obligations of family structures, where the ascetic vocation would otherwise seem to undermine them.

II. Mothers and Daughters Described

Sophia and Euphemia of Edessa

The fifth-century romance Euphemia and the Goth tells the story of a poor Edessan widow, Sophia, and her young freeborn daughter, Euphemia; Euphemia's marriage to a Goth soldier and subsequent reduction to slavery; her miraculous rescue by the great saints of Edessa, the martyrs Shmona, Guria, and Habib; Euphemia's reunion with her mother; and the justice of God wrought through the power of God's saints. ³⁴

The story belongs to a cycle of texts produced in the first half of the fifth century to glorify Edessa, "The Blessed City." Its stated intention is to celebrate the cult of Shmona, Guria, and Habib, martyred around the year 306. ³⁵ In a poignant sense, Shmona, Guria, and Habib were the saints of Edessa's humble people. The first martyrs of whom we can be [End Page 36] certain for the western Syriac-speaking region, ³⁶ they were two laymen and a deacon, villagers rather than from the urban aristocracy. ³⁷ The story of Sophia and Euphemia makes a pointed correlation between the lowly social status of its victims and the saints to whom they turn; it represents Shmona, Guria, and Habib as a powerful source of justice for those who had no other succour. ³⁸ Indeed, as images, women of humble status would have been the most effective rhetorical vehicle for this message, since they represented the most socially helpless and endangered members of the community. ³⁹

Euphemia and the Goth claims to be the record of an anonymous writer who heard the story from the paramonarios (caretaker) of the Shrine of the Edessan martyrs, a witness to their great miracle in the saving of Euphemia. ⁴⁰ Here is the story he tells:

In the year 396 the Roman army encamped in the city of Edessa, and a Goth "bitter of soul" billeted in the house of the widow Sophia and her only child, a virgin daughter Euphemia. A pious Christian, Sophia had [End Page 37] raised her daughter with due care and modesty (nakpûtâ), ⁴¹ keeping her carefully hidden from men, including the Goth, as was the custom regarding young girls. After a time the Goth saw the girl and courted Sophia to accept his suit for marriage, with blandishments and flattery, great oaths as to his honorable intentions, and lavish displays of gold.

The virtuous widow did not trust the Goth. She suspected that a wife and son awaited him back home. But finally she wore out, "like a weak woman." No kinsman came to her aid. She prayed for guidance to "the God of orphans and widows," and raised one final objection to the Goth's proposal--the heart of the matter, "I cannot separate my daughter from me all this distance." ⁴² The Goth swore to settle in Edessa. Sophia agreed. Euphemia was given in marriage.

Eventually the army was relocated and the Goth given permission to return with his new wife to his own country. In desperation, Sophia took him and her now pregnant daughter to the Shrine of the Edessan martyrs, Shmona, Guria, and Habib. Upon their coffin she prayed for her daughter's protection "in the country of the stranger"; and she compelled the Goth with his hand upon that same coffin to swear an oath to deal justly with Euphemia. The couple set out, and Sophia "was in bitter sorrow and continuous weeping night and day that she was deprived of the companionship and sight of her daughter." ⁴³

After a long journey the couple reached the country of the Goth, and he "rose up against [Euphemia] like a rapacious wolf." ⁴⁴ Stripping off her finery, he dressed her as a slave and announced that he was already married. To this point in the story, Euphemia's character had been silent. Now her voice is heard. In fury, the girl recalled his oath before the saints, and cursed above all his treachery in reducing her--a stranger, and freeborn (bart hîrê )--to slavery. She began to pray continually to the martyrs of Edessa and to God, the Lord of Joseph who had been enslaved in Egypt, the Lord who "[cares] for the oppression of the free." ⁴⁵

Euphemia was presented to the Goth's wife as a slave, but the wife had no doubt as to her husband's perfidy. She treated Euphemia harshly and beat her all the more when she realized the girl was pregnant. Euphemia's plight was the worse for her isolation: she did not speak their language, [End Page 38] and no one spoke Syriac except the Goth who had betrayed her. When she gave birth to a boy, his resemblance to his father heightened the wife's fury. The Goth took no interest and left the women to themselves. ⁴⁶ The wife soon poisoned the baby.

When Euphemia found her child dying in convulsions, she cried out bitterly to the Edessan martyrs. Then she took a piece of wool, and wiping the poisoned foam from the baby's lips she kept it "with care," finally dipping it one night into the wife's drinking cup. The woman died, "[falling] into the pit which she herself had dug." ⁴⁷ In revenge her family beat Euphemia mercilessly and sealed her in a tomb of stinking corpses. Euphemia, nearly dead, once more prayed to the Edessan martyrs. The stench of the tomb turned to the sweet fragrance of spices. She found herself in Edessa at the Shrine of Shmona, Guria, and Habib.

The story was soon told throughout the city with great rejoicing, and mother and daughter at last reunited took up a simple life together of constant prayer. On Fridays and Sundays they stood vigil all day at the shrine of the Edessan Martyrs, "in all modesty" (nakpûtâ). ⁴⁸

Eventually the Goth returned on military assignment, and the people of Edessa and the kinsmen of Euphemia brought him to justice at the hands of the court. At the intervention of the bishop, his death sentence was administered with mercy, and the people of Edessa gave glory and praise to God. While the story's emphasis lies on bringing the Goth to a just end and righteous execution, yet the image remains, however quietly in the background, of the greatness of this restoration: mother and daughter reunited.

It is a chilling tale. Still, Euphemia and the Goth presents a number of images that correlate with historical sources. Its portrayal of Gothic mercenaries stationed in Edessa, for example, appears faithful to actual experience. ⁴⁹ Its portrayal of women's lives is also telling. [End Page 39]

The story portrays a relationship between mother and daughter defined by cultural dictates exterior and interior to the household; their relationship is shown to function as part of Edessa's city structure more than as a personal relationship between a woman and her daughter. For the first part of the story their relationship is shown in its exterior aspect, constrained by the mother's task of raising her daughter in a manner suitable to the community's structural needs: preparing her for marriage (for which guarding her virginity was a crucial part), and the subsequent move of daughter as object in the father's household to object in the husband's household. A widow, Sophia must play the political role of father in the task of transacting a suitable marriage. The interior aspect of the relationship, the bond and interaction of mother and daughter as female parent to female child, is visible to us only obliquely through Sophia's pain when Euphemia is taken away. Her grief at this separation has again both private and public components. Privately, she is deprived of the special companionship of her daughter, her only child. But the story's stress lies on the public issue of her responsibilities to safeguard her daughter's welfare in another household. This duty she cannot fulfil if her daughter is moved away from Edessa; Euphemia would be entirely at the mercy of her husband, in a country of strangers with none to watch out for her.

Accordingly, the story highlights the particular perils faced by women of low social standing. Sophia represents the problems of widowed women with limited income and no sons or other male relatives to work on their behalf; the betrothal of an only child would be a grave concern in such a situation. ⁵⁰ Peter Brown has described the morality of the early church, and especially its marital morality, as a "morality of the socially vulnerable": "Obedience on the part of servants, fair dealings between [End Page 40] partners, and the fidelity of spouses counted for far more among [those] more liable to be fatally injured by sexual infidelity, by trickery, and by the insubordination of their few household slaves than were the truly wealthy and powerful." ⁵¹ Here we catch the brutality of the Goth's crime. ⁵² In an absolute sense, Sophia has everything to lose if the Goth is not true to his word, if he does not take her daughter in honorable and faithful wedlock. The blasphemy of a false oath knowingly sworn on the bones of the holy martyrs measures the gravity of his treachery.The Goth's injustice in the eyes of the text is the subjection of a freeborn girl to slavery. It is against this that Euphemia herself rails in her first spoken words of the story (for this is the point at which the social code is broken), and it is against this crime that her kinsmen--previously nowhere to be seen--rise to take a stand upon her return to Edessa. For Sophia and Euphemia, whose freeborn status is all they have, safety depends on a moral code that respects marital fidelity, honesty, and fairness. When that code is broken, they have no means of recourse except the power of God's saints.

Ruhm and Her Daughters

While Sophia and Euphemia raise the issue of the "socially vulnerable," the image of wealthy women did not necessarily offer a more positive illustration of their situation. The sixth century eyewitness reports of Christians massacred at Najran by Jewish rulers contain the account of Ruhm, a respected noblewoman of the city and a mother of daughters. ⁵³ The king [End Page 41] had given orders that Ruhm be spared after her husband was martyred. Ruhm instead chose martyrdom for herself and her daughters. In the report by Simeon of Beth Arsham she is presented as a woman who complied with traditional gender roles, a woman forced by extreme circumstances to take a public stance otherwise unthinkable for her. Thus Ruhm, "a woman whose face no one had ever seen outside the gate of her house, who had never walked in the town in broad daylight," took her daughters by hand and "stood there in the presence of the entire town, her head uncovered." ⁵⁴ Summoning the women of Najran, pagan, Christian, and Jewish, she delivered an apology for her course of action. Simeon presents the speech as a lament for the hardships of childbearing and of women's fate in the household. ⁵⁵ The choice of martyrdom is thereby depicted as Ruhm's salvation from women's condition in the world, no less than from the world itself: "But from this day on I am free from all this. . . . Blessed are you my fellow women . . . blessed am I and blessed are my daughters, for what a blessed state it is to which we are going!" ⁵⁶

The text portrays Ruhm's boldness in stark terms by stating four times in the course of her martyrdom that Ruhm's head and face were uncovered, indeed that she stood thus before the king "without feeling any shame." ⁵⁷ Yet the text renders Ruhm's actions appropriate in the most [End Page 42] traditional sense by justifying them according to the concept of betrothal to Christ. Ruhm declares in word and by action that she is unveiled because she is en route to her second wedding feast, and that she brings her virgin daughters prepared for Christ to whom she has betrothed them. ⁵⁸ The Christian aspect of her role as mother required her to safeguard the religious inviolability of her unmarried daughters no less than their physical virginity. Ruhm's actions may well have appeared unsettling because of an assertiveness apparently deemed inappropriate to her gender. But the use of betrothal language validated her decision for martyrdom in terms upholding the public responsibilities of a mother: she had prepared, preserved, and presented her daughters fittingly for marriage. The private aspect--a woman taking control for herself and her daughters, in terms that removed them altogether from the social structure of their community--is obscured by the circumstances of martyrdom which, for Christians, overrode any other loyalty.

Euphemia and Maria of Amida

Sophia and Ruhm are presented as Christian mothers acting out of traditional marital structures, dictated by their situations as widows. The choice of the ascetic life, however, whether in the confines of a religious community or of one's own home, was often viewed as a parallel but alternative course to the family institution, one that assumed structurally some of the same social and political obligations. ⁵⁹ In the Syrian Orient, there seems to have been substantial fluidity between family and religious community as ascetic locations. It is not unusual in Syriac hagiography for a parent to enter the monastery with child in tow, or for a household to be internally redefined as a monastic community. But taking up the ascetic life together altered the nature of the mother-daughter relationship, with important implications.

John of Ephesus recorded the career of the sixth-century holy woman Euphemia and her daughter Maria in the city of Amida. ⁶⁰ Euphemia had been widowed as a young woman soon after Maria's birth. She then chose [End Page 43] to follow the example of her sister, a nun, and turned to the ascetic life, raising Maria accordingly. The two followed a strict regimen of fasting, regulated prayer, and recitation of the offices day and night in their home. Euphemia trained Maria in reading and writing for the purposes of their devotions; these were centered on psalmody and Scripture readings, in a pattern similar to that prescribed for the Daughters of the Covenant by the Rabbula canons. ⁶¹ In order to provide for themselves, Maria wove yarn which Euphemia sold for their simple keep.

But Euphemia's ascetic practice included the vow of service. With Maria at home, Euphemia took on the burden of caring for Amida's sick and destitute, establishing an extensive network of social care for the needy. Further, she drew on Maria as partner rather than daughter: the yarn Maria spun financed this work, until additional donations from the city's nobility were needed due to the scale of Euphemia's activities. Initially, the town was scandalized by Euphemia's behavior, seeing her as a "working mother" who left her daughter alone all day. Maria replied to the criticism, "My mother's labor is greater than all labors, and God strengthens me through her prayers." ⁶² In time, the two became a crucial part of the city's life as they gained both authority and veneration from the townspeople. When eventually they were exiled as Monophysites, their accusers complained that the people of the city honored the two women more than they honored the bishop. ⁶³

In some respects Euphemia followed the traditional household role of mother. She kept her unwed daughter at home and, as widowed head of the household, she herself maintained their public relationship with the city. When Monophysite refugees stayed at their house, she kept Maria out of sight--much as the Edessan Sophia had tried to guard her unwed daughter from the sight of the Goth. But the nature of a shared ascetic life altered the roles of Euphemia and Maria with respect to one another: Euphemia came to work with Maria as an equal, as familial partner ⁶⁴ rather than as mother with daughter. ⁶⁵ The initial distress of the city shows how great a strain such activity exerted on its social organization. Euphemia and Maria were two single women of modest means who became de facto leaders in the community. Thus they leveled not only the social structure [End Page 44] of a provincial city, but the inherently hierarchical structure of the family as well. ⁶⁶

John provides a surprisingly detailed description of both the public ministry and the private prayer discipline of these two women. He consequently speaks of life within the household at greater length than any other author in the texts here considered. John's attention to the private domain is not out of interest in the dynamics of this mother-daughter relationship as such, however. Rather, he is concerned to present the ascetic course of each of his subjects; in this case, that course is followed across lines normally separating conduct exterior and interior to a household. For John, space is not organized according to public and private domains, but according to locations and types of ascetic activity. It is the ascetic discipline of these two women and not their relationship that intrigues him.

Euphemia's actions, like those of the Najran martyr Ruhm, removed her daughter from the standard dictates or expectations of the community. In both cases, the mothers exerted their traditional household authority in making these decisions for their daughters; and, in both cases, the familiar language of betrothal to Christ allowed a traditional social interpretation of the courses followed. John reported Euphemia's dying words to Maria in precisely this fashion: "My daughter, take comfort in Christ and guard yourself in purity for the Lord, your lord to whom you are betrothed." ⁶⁷ But in the events, mothers and daughters gained an equality of status with respect to the religious signification of their roles. All were equally betrothed to Christ; the mother's religious import was no greater than her daughter's. Christianity clearly opened a different set of possibilities for what might constitute the mother-daughter relationship.

Irene and Her Mother, the Queen

The stories we have considered thus far indicate how the Christian family could continue to function socially as had the traditional Greco-Roman family. Other models from hagiography use the mother-daughter relationship specifically to present the changed meanings and functions of the Christian family, when defined according to relationships engendered by baptism and resulting in spiritual kinship networks. ⁶⁸ [End Page 45]

The Syriac version of the legend of Irene provides an example. ⁶⁹ The text records the thrilling exploits of Irene, only daughter of the pagan king, Licinius. Irene converted to Christianity as a young girl by choosing the ascetic life over that of "the wedding feast of the world." ⁷⁰ Baptized by the apostle Timothy, she enacted a mighty career humiliating kings, slaying pagans, raising the dead, and converting multitudes across the cities of the Syrian Orient until at last she came to a peaceful death in Ephesus.

In this text, the bonds created by baptism invert the relationships of a biologically constituted family. When Irene announced her conversion to her pagan parents, her father did not understand and later did his best to martyr her. But her mother the queen, while not yet comprehending, at once perceived the significance of the change. As the king and his nobles led Irene to imprisonment in the city, "the queen her mother came after her daughter with her body bent over, and she took the dust from beneath the feet of her daughter. And she pressed it on her eyes and on her body, saying, 'May this dust from beneath the holy feet of my beloved daughter be to me for rest and healing, and for the salvation of my life and for the forgiveness of sins and for the new life which is eternal.'" ⁷¹ Soon the queen and then the king converted. Thus had mother become daughter to her own child: not physically birthed from her womb but re-created by her, fashioned anew from the very dust of the earth.

In the traditional ancient household, the "mother" was the one whose body represented the birth of the child. ⁷² As we have seen, a mother's role [End Page 46] with respect to a female child included the provision of physical care, moral instruction in the preparation for marriage, and vigilance after marriage for her daughter's wellbeing. In spiritual motherhood, Irene brought the queen to new birth from the baptismal font, nourished her with the sustenance of salvation, and established her on the holy course of devotional life. Accordingly, Irene maintained a parallel pattern of responsibility for her spiritual daughter within the "household" of the Christian community. Where the Amidan holy woman, Euphemia, and her daughter, Maria, had levelled family structure interior to their household so that they became equals, Irene and her mother inverted it, with daughter as mother and mother as daughter. ⁷³

Bryene and Febronia

Irene's story points to one more mother-daughter configuration in Syriac literature, found in the female monastic community. Here, the spiritual family was based on the common bond of baptism. In the "household" of the convent, the abbess served as mother, by virtue of her greater spiritual authority, over her daughters, the nuns.The arrangement is portrayed in the legend of Febronia, martyred by Romans in Nisibis. ⁷⁴ The text presents Bryene, an abbess of wisdom and distinction, presiding over a convent of fifty women. The convent is described as a community of many fine women: their friendships, their loyalty to one another, and their devotion to the abbess are repeatedly stressed. ⁷⁵ [End Page 47]

The story also reveals the degree to which cultural expectations governed the understanding even of women's spiritual relationships. Bryene's relationship to Febronia differs from the others. Febronia is her biological niece--daughter of her brother--brought to the convent as a two year old, to be raised by the abbess as she saw fit. Bryene should love the nuns equally; she does not. Although she is called "Mother" by all, for Febronia alone we are shown a bond resembling that of mother and daughter by blood rather than spiritual kinship, as though the circumstances of Bryene's guardianship over Febronia had determined the nature of their relationship in such terms.

When Bryene realizes Febronia will be singled out for arrest by Roman soldiers, she admonishes her fiercely in the terms dictated for mother and daughter by the traditional household structure. Here, the maintenance of proper social roles by gender separation stands parallel to the image of convent and city separated by religious boundaries. Kept apart from laywomen as well as from men of any status, Febronia's virginity is both physical and social. Bryene speaks, "Remember that when you were two years old I received you from your nurse into my hands: up to this present moment no man has set eyes upon your face, and I have not allowed laywomen to talk to you. Up to this very day I have preserved you, my daughter. . . . Do not disgrace Bryene's old age, do not do anything that will render profitless the work of your spiritual mother." ⁷⁶ Once again, the image of betrothal to Christ allows a traditional marital veneer to be cast over the social consequences of virginity. Bryene instructs Febronia to preserve her wedding pledge, even as Febronia will announce her wedding feast in heaven to the judge who decrees her death. ⁷⁷

In what follows, Febronia acquits herself with stunning strength as she is martyred by sexual torture. Her body is the textual metaphor for the inviolability of her faith. ⁷⁸ Again, Bryene is shown to act according to her biological bond. While the other nuns and the women of the city go to the stadium to share in Febronia's suffering, Bryene stays behind weeping at the altar, unable to bear the spiritual and physical violation taking place. [End Page 48] When Febronia's dismembered body is returned to her, she faints. The entire convent gives itself to great mourning on behalf of their beloved sister, but Bryene's is the grief of traditional family motherhood, the grief of separation: "O my daughter Febronia, today you are taken away from the sight of your mother Bryene. Who will read the Scriptures to the sisters? What fingers will handle your books?" When the time for afternoon prayers arrives, Bryene weeps, "My daughter Febronia, the time for prayer has come. . . . Where are you, Febronia my daughter, my little daughter, rise up, little child, rise up, come." ⁷⁹

In the story's denouement, peace is reestablished. The convent again becomes a thriving community, guided now by the strengthening power of Febronia's relics and shrine. Moreover, on the anniversary of her death, when the convent celebrates her memorial, Febronia is seen to appear each year standing in her place for afternoon prayers as Bryene had bidden. The first year it happened, Bryene had rushed to embrace her, crying "It is my daughter Febronia." The apparition at once disappeared. Thereafter when she appeared each year, "no one again dared approach her; nevertheless many tears were shed at their joy in just seeing her." ⁸⁰

In a text otherwise presenting friendship between nuns as that of familial partners, and stressing the spiritual mother-daughter relationship, Bryene's love for Febronia is characterized according to a traditional family model rather than spiritual motherhood. Although Febronia is the story's saint--and thereby the true spiritual mother to Bryene--she is construed throughout in the role of traditional and obedient daughter, even after death. This brings us to the question of how these texts define the mother-daughter relationship in both its traditional and spiritual forms, and what that relationship may have meant for those who wrote and heard these stories.

III. Mothers and Daughters Restored

In all of our stories, the relationship between mother and daughter is presented in terms of responsibilities. Whether in the traditional household or the spiritual family, the mother bears the long term responsibility for her daughter's physical, social, and moral wellbeing. The stories highlight the gravity of such responsibility when women are without assistance [End Page 49] from men, whether by death, absence, or religious opposition. In turn, the social limits of a mother's responsibility may be seen in the example of Irene's childhood, when her mother is powerless to prevent the father from imprisoning his daughter until her marriage, and powerless again to carry out her own desire to share that imprisonment. ⁸¹

Furthermore, in both the traditional and spiritual settings it is the mother in the absence of male authority who stands at the interface between the public and private contexts of these relationships. The mothers interact with the larger social and political community--the city, its residents, officials, and church authorities--while the daughters, even in adulthood, remain silent in the public realm behind their mother's public, maternal authority. Maria the daughter of Euphemia and the daughters of Ruhm do not speak in the texts. Rather, the point at which a daughter is given voice is the point of social extremity, at which normative structures of responsibility no longer function. Sophia's daughter Euphemia speaks only in her crisis in the country of the Goth; returned to Edessa and to her mother, she resumes her silence in the story. It is Sophia who conducts the legal proceedings when the Goth reappears. Irene and Febronia speak throughout their stories, but in so doing they assume the spiritual authority that will set them over their biological female parents (Bryene as aunt is in this role). Irene's mother in her new identity will take up a prayer life protected by Irene's public, spiritual authority. When the crisis of martyrdom and the need for her spiritual leadership is passed, Febronia from beyond the grave is again the dutiful daughter whose mother stands between her and the world.

For both the traditional (biological) and the spiritual mother-daughter relationship, then, our texts indicate public and private contexts. The public view alone is described in detail. The private relationship--what these mothers and daughters had as their bond or interaction in the interior context of their households or convents, apart from their obligations to public structures--is left unexplored. We catch oblique glimpses only and these are always at the point of separation: ⁸² Sophia's wretched grief when Euphemia is taken from her and the overwhelming joy of their reunion; Maria's grief when her mother Euphemia dies of exhaustion; ⁸³ the severe grief of Irene's mother when Irene is shut away by her father at the age of six; Bryene's grief at Febronia's tortured death. Ruhm's decision [End Page 50] that she and her daughters will die together is striking for just this reason: not that she is portrayed as joyful rather than griefstricken at her chosen course, for "joy" is appropriate to the rhetoric of martyrdom, but rather that her decision keeps her together with her daughters in death as in life. Even Irene, whose spiritual motherhood is portrayed without emotional texture, is reunited with her mother but not with her father prior to death. ⁸⁴

In fact, little distinguishes the traditional from the spiritual mother-daughter bond in these stories. Most importantly, in both kinds of relationship the characters are shown to seek the same resolution to their dilemmas: whether in biological or spiritual relationships, the mothers and daughters seek to remain together. In both instances, the bond between mother and daughter is shown to result in intense loyalty to one another. To the public eye, that loyalty is constructed in terms of responsibility to the social order. In the private realm, that loyalty is demonstrated by the desire not to be separated. The texts present the "love" between mother and daughter in this way: grief at separation, joy at reunion, the desire and choice to live together.

Indeed, if we can discern an impact on the mother-daughter relationship from the Christianization of the family, it is profoundly apparent here: the ascetic life provided women a means to remain together as mother and daughter rather than being separated into different households by fathers and husbands. As we have noted, Syriac Christianity contained patterns of thought and of social organization that allowed for such a development. It may also be in that possibility of shared life, as mother and daughter, acknowledged but unexplored by our texts in its interior aspects, that we see a glimmer of women's experience as they may have sought to define it themselves. These stories do not oppose the familial relationship of mother and daughter to that of devotion to God; instead, the one supports the other.

Like all Christian literature, these texts must ultimately retell the salvation drama of the gospel message. Restoration must follow violent destruction, and it must bring an order not merely reestablished but one transformed. For these texts about mothers and daughters, the motif of separation and reunion is not one of simple poignancy. In our stories, the relationship of mother to daughter--whether by blood or spiritual kinship--is one which is sundered by men (usually through violence against the daughters, the most vulnerable figure in the pair) and then restored by divine aid in response to the women's desire for one another. Restored, [End Page 51] the relationship is also changed. It is no longer a relationship structured by responsibility to the public order, but one of shared devotion to a life of faith. In terms of the women characters, their relationship is no longer of value because of its androcentric function; rather, it is valued because of its theocentric function for their religious life.

Euphemia and the Goth demonstrates this literary task with particular clarity. The irony of this text lies in its expressed view that the beatings, murder of the child, murder of the Goth's wife, and the attempted murder of Euphemia are all of secondary importance to the real act of violence: Euphemia's subjection to slavery. Euphemia herself is a murderer, yet the text does not judge her for this. Nonetheless, these events are so extreme that the story's resolution comes as a shock: reunited, Euphemia and Sophia lead a life of prayer, in all modesty and purity. Nakpûtâ, an important concept for Syriac Christianity and a technical term for the ascetic life, is applied to them both before Euphemia's marriage and after her return. ⁸⁵ Here is the true redeeming power of the Edessan saints. Sophia and Euphemia are brought by their immense suffering to a restored life of prayer; their faith had remained "pure" throughout their ordeal. But they are also finally together. And they are changed in that togetherness, for the obligations of a marriage-defined culture no longer govern their relationship.

The Life of Febronia follows a similar course, with the trial by violence focused on Febronia's body. Her victorious death follows extensive sexual torture and mutilation, yet her body like her faith is venerated as inviolate after the martyrdom is finished. ⁸⁶ The return of her relics restores Febronia bodily to her household, but she further returns by apparition each year at the celebration of her feast day because Bryene in her grief--a mother's grief at separation--had begged her to come back. In the story men contrive once more to separate the pair. A grand shrine is built for Febronia's body in Nisibis, and the bishops come in full liturgical splendor to remove her relics from the convent. The nuns are devastated. To their dismay, Bryene is calm and deferential; she has already guessed [End Page 52] the outcome. No earthly power, and certainly not the power of men, can move Febronia's relics from the convent: "Febronia's body was like a ray of the sun, and it was as though fire and lightning were flashing out from her." One last time Bryene speaks as mother to daughter, "I beseech you, lady Febronia, do not be angry with your mother . . . remember all the toils Bryene has been through; do not put my old age to shame." ⁸⁷ The body releases a single tooth, and with this the bishops must content themselves. Febronia and Bryene are mother and daughter restored, physically as well as spiritually, despite their separation by death.

The account of Ruhm carries a related image. In the course of her martyrdom, the torture that preceded her death was the treatment of her daughters and granddaughter. These were slain in her presence, and their blood poured into her own mouth. When the king asked her, "How did your daughter's blood taste to you?," Ruhm replied "Like a pure spotless offering; that is what it tasted like in my mouth and in my soul." ⁸⁸ The act of physically desecrating the traditional bond of mother and daughter here became the act of their triumph over evil, even as their holy deaths brought their restoration to one another.

The moral to these stories is sharply in view. These are women of true faith; their purity of faith is measured literarily by their bodily purity. Sexual abuse (Febronia) or kinship desecration (Ruhm) does not defile them, as murder did not defile the Edessan Euphemia. ⁸⁹ These stories proclaim [End Page 53] Christianity's victory over evil through the metaphor of violence against women and its antithesis, the image of women's sanctity through bodily intactness. ⁹⁰ The stories we have considered reverse the violation of women's bodies by restoring their purity after their desecration. At the moment of her martyrdom Irene is joined by a repentant prostitute, whose virginal innocence she at once restores, guaranteeing the penitent's salvation. Irene herself, martyred by dismemberment, is then reconstituted by angels. ⁹¹ But we must not be deceived by the grandeur of the imagery: the literary violence of our texts is not altogether divorced from the reality of women's lives. Battered wives and abused slaves were hardly unheard of in late antiquity. ⁹² Sexual torture is attested in our historical sources. ⁹³ The Amidan Euphemia and her daughter Maria were imprisoned and exiled because of their effective leadership within the Monophysite community. ⁹⁴

To late antique society, the relationship of mothers and daughters represented humanity at its weakest: a relationship between women, whose bond was based on the responsibilities of a biological identification with one another. In a society that invariably valued the physical far less than the spiritual and women far less than men, mothers and daughters counted for little. It is the moral of these stories that even this frail bond, powerless in any real social or political sense, could serve as vehicle for God's triumph over Satan. This is the "rhetoric of paradox" par excellence. ⁹⁵ The strongly normative social interests of the texts remind us that here we have men defining women's stories. [End Page 54]

Still, these stories contain a further irony. In hellenistic novels, lovers are separated and achieve their reunion only after suffering extreme adversity. Their devotion to one another is measured by the violence against which they must contend in order to be reunited. ⁹⁶ Our stories follow this conventional plot outline save in one stark respect: the separated "lovers" are mother and daughter. Their restoration is to a household, on earth or in heaven, in which they can deliberately live again as mother and daughter. In their public locations, their lives continue to be constrained by male kin, public officials, and ecclesiastical authorities. In their restored households, out of the public view of the texts, we are simply told that they are together, mothers and daughters, in a life of prayer. ⁹⁷ What is unique is not the strength of the women heroines; for that, we have parallels in Jewish as well as hellenistic romance. Rather, it is the choice and achievement of their mother-daughter relationships, cordoned off from the androcentric structures of society, that is remarkable in these texts.

These stories portray the Christianization of the family as an occurrence in which a traditional, physical bond acquires spiritual significance when that bond is sealed by shared piety and irresolute faith. Christian rhetoric privileging the spiritual family over the biological family does not, in these stories, succeed in removing or replacing a relationship whose strength is shown to belie its "social vulnerability." There is another moral, quietly but profoundly presented in each story's conclusion: mother and daughter restored to one another in a relationship defined between humans and maintained in physical life together. Our texts do not examine the interior quality of what constitutes a mother-daughter relationship in its private [End Page 55] reality. Yet they cannot rhetorically erase a relationship women apparently valued for its own sake, however spiritualized the context. Despite their androcentric interests, these texts do not speak in a single, gendered voice. Hidden behind these stories as men chose to tell them are women's stories, too, as women chose to live them.

Susan Ashbrook Harvey is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University.

Notes

1. I am grateful in particular to Michelle Frey for assistance, and to Flora Keshgegian, J. Giles Milhaven, Stanley K. Stowers, and the two anonymous readers for the Journal of Early Christian Studies for fruitful discussion and advice. This study is dedicated to Professor Grace Gredys Harris. I shall use the following abbreviations: BHO 5 Paul Peeters, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Orientalis, Subsidia Hagiographica 10 (Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1910; repr. 1954); BHG 5 F. Halkin, Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, 3rd ed., Subsidia Hagiographica 8a and Novum Auctarium Bibliothecae Hagiographicae Graecae, Subsidia Hagiographica 65 (Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1957 and 1984).

2. Fundamental for this study are Evelyne Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance 4e­7e siècles (Paris/La Haye: Mouton, 1977), 113­55; and, as background, Judith P. Hallett, Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society: Women and the Elite Family (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Mother (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988); and idem, The Roman Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).

3. On Roman mothers and daughters, see Hallett, Fathers and Daughters, 257­62; Dixon, The Roman Mother, 210­32 (where she points out that a study like Hallett's simply could not be done on mothers and daughters, because of the nature of the surviving evidence); and Jane E. Phillips, "Roman Mothers and the Lives of their Adult Daughters," Helios n.s. 6 (1978): 69­80. These studies are concerned with Latin evidence and focus primarily on the aristocracy; comparable work for the eastern Empire remains to be done. The Syriac literature considered in the present study does capture a broader social spectrum, if still more limited than we might wish.

4. Early Christian literature in general upholds this picture. Patlagean,Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale, 113­55; Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) 171­88; Rebecca H. Weaver, "A Subordinate Loyalty--Christian Teaching on the Family," Affirmation 5 (1992): 21­50.

5. While care must be taken to avoid anachronistically reading modern societal values into ancient relationships, especially for the family, one cannot deny the rich emotional texture of literary portraits such as those I will be discussing here. Lloyd deMause, "The Evolution of Childhood," in The History of Childhood: The Untold Story of Child Abuse, ed. idem (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1988), 1­73 illustrates the problem of a modern agenda; Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 47­62 ("The Bodies of Children") denies the poignant emotional complexity of the ancient evidence.

6. Cf. John Winkler's comment, "there is a notion about that the Greek romances are monotonously ideal, whereas in fact they are as various in tone as any good literature ever is." John J. Winkler, "The Invention of Romance," in James Tatum, The Search for the Ancient Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 23­38, at p. 27. The same can easily be said for notions about hagiographical literature.

7. These Syriac texts present a picture of the family and its social context consonant with what we know about the larger Roman Empire, where other geographical areas have left more abundant documentary evidence. See above, nn. 2 and 3. A. D. Lee, "Close-Kin Marriage in Late Antique Mesopotamia," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 29 (1988): 403­13, while not dealing with the relationships of concern for the present study, suggests strong evidence for the survival of non-Christian marriage patterns (showing Persian influence) in the Syrian Orient well into the sixth century. Judith Evans Grubbs, "'Pagan' and 'Christian' Marriage: The State of the Question," Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 361­412, argues persuasively for considerable continuity between Roman and Christian family values with respect to the moral ideals attributed to marriage. In this article, I am suggesting that "Christianization" made its impact on the family institution not in terms of these moral ideals, but in other aspects of the family structure.

8. E.g., Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire,148­49; Arnaldo Momigliano, "Ancient Biography and the Study of Religion in the Roman Empire," Poikilia: Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1987), 33­48.

9. The social conservatism of the hellenistic novels is discussed, e.g.,in Tomas Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); John J. Winkler, "The Invention of Romance," in Tatum, Search for the Ancient Novel, 23­38; David Konstan, "Apollonius, King of Tyre and the Greek Novel," in Tatum, Search for the Ancient Novel, 173­82; and with particular force in Brigitte Egger, "Women and Marriage in the Greek Novels: The Boundaries of Romance," in Tatum, Search for the Ancient Novel, 260­80.

10. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 155­88; and idem, "Virginity as Metaphor: Women and the Rhetoric of Early Christianity," in Averil Cameron, ed., History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 181­205.

11. Of the texts treated in this paper, only the Life of Febronia (below,n. 74) offers the possibility of female authorship; it claims to have been written by the nun Thomais, though this may be a literary device necessary to the story's coherence. Female authorship in late antiquity is extremely rare. See Mary R. Lefkowitz, "Did Ancient Women Write Novels?" and Ross S. Kraemer, "Women's Authorship of Jewish and Christian Literature in the Greco-Roman Period," both in Amy-Jill Levine, "Women Like This": New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 199­220 and 221­42 , respectively. On the problems of using hagiography as a source for women's lives, see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "Women in Early Byzantine Hagiography: Reversing the Story," in "That Gentle Strength": Historical Perspectives on Women and Christianity, ed. Lynda L. Coon, Katherine J. Haldane, and Elisabeth W. Sommers (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press: 1990), 36­59.

12. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 93­116.

13. Cf. Cameron, "Virginity as Metaphor."

14. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 91­93;Elizabeth A. Clark, "Ideology, History, and the Construction of 'Woman' in Late Ancient Christianity," Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994): 155­84.

15. Compare Clark, "Ideology, History, and the Construction of 'Woman,' "on the limited success of early Christian rhetoric that would essentialize and "fix" a particular notion of "woman."

16. Even if one cannot go so far as to agree with the specific possibility of female authorship. The now classic presentation of that hypothesis for the Apocryphal Acts is Stevan L. Davies, The Revolt of the Widows: The Social World of the Apocryphal Acts (London: Feffer and Simons, 1980). The study on Jewish heroines of the imperial period by Richard L. Pervo, "Aseneth and Her Sisters: Women in Jewish Narrative and Greek Novels," in Levine, "Women Like This," 145­60, raises the parallel issue for Jewish literature.

17. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said (Boston:Beacon Press, 1992): 21­48.

18. See the ground-breaking study by Caroline Walker Bynum, "Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols," in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 1­20.

19. Robert Murray, "The Characteristics of the Earliest Syriac Christianity," in East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, ed. Nina Garsoian, Thomas Mathews, and Robert Thomson (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Publications, 1982), 3­16; Sebastian P. Brock, "Early Syrian Asceticism," Numen 20 (1973): 1­19 [5 idem, Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity (London: Variorum, 1984), ch. I]; Jean Gribomont, "Le Monachisme au sein de l'église en Syrie et en Cappadoce," Studia Monastica 7 (1965): 7­24. For an especially prominent case, see Sidney H. Griffith, "Images of Ephrem: The Syrian Holy Man and his Church," Traditio 45 (1989­90): 7­33.

20. For example, Aphrahat, Demonstration 1, "On Faith," ed. D. I.Parisot, Aphraatis Sapientis Persae, Demonstrationes, in Patrologia Syriaca, Pars Prima, ed. R. Graffin (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1894), 1, cols. 5­46; trans. J. Gwynn, NPNF, 2nd ser., 13 (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1898), 345­52.

21. See now the rich discussion of îhîdyâ in Sidney H. Griffith, " 'Singles' in God's Service: Thoughts on the Iˆhîdyê from the Works of Aphrahat and Ephraem the Syrian," The Harp 4 (1991): 145­59.

22. "Ephrem's Letter to Publius," sec. 15­16, ed. and trans. Sebastian P. Brock, Le Muséon 89 (1976): 286­87.

23. Best chronicled in Théodoret de Cyr, Histoire des moines de Syrie, ed. and trans. Pierre Canivet and Agnes Leroy-Molinghen, Sources Chrétiennes 234 and 257 (Paris, 1977­79); also trans. R. M. Price, Theodoret of Cyrrhus: A History of the Monks of Syria, Cistercian Studies 88 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1985). See the essential commentary of Pierre Canivet, Le Monachisme Syrien selon Théodoret de Cyr, Théologie Historique 42 (Paris: Éditions Beauchesne, 1977).

24. Arthur Vööbus, History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient, Vol. 1, CSCO 184/Sub. 14 and Vol. 2, CSCO 197/Sub. 17 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1958) long ago stressed the importance of the location of Syriac monasteries in relation to villages, towns, and cities. Vööbus attributed the development largely to the political insecurity of the Syrian Orient, especially in Mesopotamia, as border territory often in military dispute between the Roman Empire and Persia, and subject to periodic raids by mercenary Huns as well as other unruly forces. See further Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Asceticism and Society in Crisis: John of Ephesus and the "Lives of the Eastern Saints" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Andrew Palmer, Monk and Mason on the Tigris Frontier: The Early History of Tur Abdin, University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 39 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1990).

25. The Teaching of Addai, ed. and trans. George Howard (Missoula:Scholars Press, 1981) at 100­101. On this text, its dating, and its relation to the cycles on the Edessan martyrs, see Sebastian P. Brock, "Eusebius and Syriac Christianity," in Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism, ed. Harold A. Attridge and Gohei Hata (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 212­34.

26. Vita S. Rabbulae, ed. Paul Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum (Paris: Otto Harrassowitz, 1890­7; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), 4:396­450; trans. G. Bickell, "Sämmtliche Prosa-Schriften des Bischofs Rabulas von Edessa," in idem, Ausgewählte Schriften der syrischen Kirchenväter Aphraates, Rabulas und Isaak v. Ninive, Bibliothek der Kirchenväter 102­4, 204­5 (Kempten, 1874­6), 155­271. On Rabbula, see Georg Günter Blum, Rabbula von Edessa: Der Christ, der Bischof, der Theologie, CSCO 300/ Sub. 34 (Louvain: Secrétariat du CorpusSCO, 1969). For discussion of the image of the city as monastery, see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "Bishop Rabbula: Ascetic Tradition and Change in Fifth Century Edessa" (forthcoming).

27. John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, ed. and trans. E.W. Brooks, Patrologia Orientalis 17­19 (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1923­25), chs. 12, 21, 31.

28. George Nedungatt, "The Covenanters of the Early Syriac-Speaking Church," Orientalia Christiana Periodica 39 (1973): 191­215, 419­44. See esp. Aphrahat, Demonstration 6, "On the Bnay and Bnat Qymâ," ed. Parisot, Patrologia Syriaca 1, cols. 239­312; trans. Gwynn, NPNF, 2nd ser., 13., at pp. 362­75.

29. See the Rabbula canons for monastics, clergy, and Bnay and Bnat Qyamâ, ed. and trans. as "The Rules of Rabbula for Monks," and "The Rules of Rabbula for the Clergy and the Qeiama," Arthur Vööbus, Syriac and Arabic Documents regarding Legislation Relative to Syrian Asceticism, Papers of the Estonian Theological Society in Exile 11 (Stockholm: Este, 1960), 24­50. The Life of Rabbula (above n. 26) is in part a commentary on the Rabbula Canons, which are quoted or paraphrased at length in the Life with some supplementary details.

30. "Rules of Rabbula for the Qeiama," canons 10 and 18.

31. "Rules of Rabbula for the Qeiama," canons 20, 27. Canons 3 and 4 indicate the need to protect the ministry of the Daughters of the Covenant from being reduced to mere housekeeping for the clergy and Sons of the Covenant. The Life of Rabbula says that the Daughters of the Covenant also served in the women's hospital run by the Edessan church: Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum 4:444.

32. Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 131­42.

33. Brock, "Early Syrian Asceticism"; idem, The Holy Spirit in the Syrian Baptismal Tradition, Syrian Church Series 9 (Poona, 1979), 51­2.

34. F. C. Burkitt, Euphemia and the Goth with the Acts of the Martyrdom of the Confessors of Edessa (Oxford/ London: Williams and Norgate for the Texts and Translation Society, 1913). The text probably does not predate 430, although the events are set in the year 396; cf. Burkitt, Euphemia, 48­69. For Edessa, see J. B. Segal, Edessa: The Blessed City (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

35. Shmona, Guria, and Habib: BHO 363­68; BHG 731­40. The Syriac texts are edited and translated in Burkitt, Euphemia and the Goth. On the texts and their historicity, see Burkitt, ibid.; Acta Sanctorum, Propylaeum Decembris (Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1940), "Martyrologium Romanum," 523­25 (Peeters); and Segal, Edessa, 83­86.

36. A brief and contained episode had occurred in Persia in the 270s; see Sebastian P. Brock, "A Martyr at the Sasanid Court under Vahran II: Candida," Analecta Bollandiana 96 (1978): 167­81 (5 Brock, Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity [London: Variorum Reprints, 1984], ch. 9). The western Syriac-speaking territory was long protected from the Roman persecution of Christians because of its semi-autonomous political situation.

37. During the early fifth century, and tied again to that era's glorification of Edessa, there appeared legends of earlier Edessan martyrs who were ancestors of the city's noble families: the accounts of the martyrs Sharbil, Babai, and Barsamya--an apparent attempt by Edessa's aristocracy to upgrade their own past. Sharbil and Babai: BHO, 1049­51; Barsamya, BHO, 150­51. The texts are edited in Paul Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum 1:95­130; trans. B. P. Pratten, in Ante-Nicene Christian Library 20 (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1871), 56­80. These texts are closely related to the Doctrine of Addai (above n. 25) by the names of the noble families included, by the desire to link Edessa to apostolic witness, and also by a strong concern to establish western connections for Edessan Christianity. On the later dating of these texts and their possible composition in Greek, see Segal, Edessa, 82­83, and Burkitt, Euphemia and the Goth, 5­28. For discussion of social class as a factor in the development of these legends, see Segal, Edessa, 83, and esp. Brock, "Eusebius and Syriac Christianity."

38. For the model, see the now classic study by Peter Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," in idem, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) 103­52.

39. Compare Cameron, "Virginity as Metaphor."

40. I follow the text in Burkitt, Euphemia and the Goth, ed. [44]­[74], trans. 129­53.

41. Euphemia, sec. 5. The description of Euphemia's upbringing in this section has a markedly ascetic tone, using standard ascetic terms for the commonplaces of this hagiographically stereotyped childhood.

42. Euphemia, sec. 10.

43. Ibid., sec. 14.

44. Ibid., sec. 15.

45. Ibid., sec. 17.

46. Yet there is pathos to the wife's situation, and probably literary pattern. Wronged by her husband's deceit and apparently childless herself, her harshness recalls Sarah's treatment of her servant Hagar when the latter had born a son to Abraham while Sarah was barren: Genesis 16: 1­6.

47. Euphemia, sec. 23.

48. Ibid, sec. 34.

49. The early sixth-century Chronicle of 'Joshua the Stylite,' ed. and tr. William Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1882), esp. sec. XCIII­XCVI, describes the impact of the Goth mercenaries on Edessa when the Roman army encamped in its territory from 505­506, and the picture accords with that in Euphemia's story. "Joshua" tells us of the financial hardship it caused "the common people" to billet the soldiers, and their complaints about it. More pointedly, he describes the Goths as particularly wild and unruly, uncontrollable even by their commanders. They devoured the resources of their hosts, were frequently drunk, prone to violence, and abusive to the Edessenes (for example, "[pouring] boiling water into the ears of those serving them for trivial faults," sec. XCVI).

50. For marriage in late antiquity, see esp. Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale, 113­55; Peter Brown, "Late Antiquity," in A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, Vol. I: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed. Paul Veyne, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987), at pp. 297­311; and David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 1­28. For the late antique understanding of childhood, see Evelyne Patlagean, "L'Enfant et son avenir dans la famille Byzantine (IVe­XIIe siècles)," in idem, Structure sociale, famille, chrétienté à Byzance, IVe­XIe siècles (London: Variorum Reprints, 1981), ch. 10; Thomas Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), esp. 176­208; Richard B. Lyman, Jr., "Barbarism and Religion: Late Roman and Early Medieval Childhood," in deMause, History of Childhood, 75­100; Rousselle, Porneia, 47­62.

51. Brown, "Late Antiquity," at p. 261. Cf. also Patlagean,Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale, 113­55.

52. The Goth's bigamy constitutes a sexual abuse of Euphemia equivalent to rape. But consider the developing Byzantine legal issues: Angeliki E. Laiou, "Sex, Consent, and Coercion in Byzantium," in idem, ed., Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993), 109­221, esp. 177­97. The story of Euphemia and the Goth is consonant with a cultural fear (of mythic dimensions) of foreign soldiers. See Frédéric Blaive, "Le Mythe indo-européen du Guerrier Impie et le péché contre la vertu des femmes," Latomus 46 (1987): 169­79.

53. The primary documents on the Najran martyrs survive in Syriac and have been edited and translated in Irfan Shahid, The Martyrs of Najran, Subsidia Hagiographica 49 (Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1971) and A. Moberg, The Book of the Himyarites (Lund, 1924). Cf. also Paul Devos, "L'Abrégé syriaque BHO 104 sur les martyrs Himyarites," Analecta Bollandiana 90 (1972): 337­59. Ruhm's importance because of both who she was and what she did is stressed in all these sources. I follow the text of Simeon of Beth Arsham's Second Letter, as edited by Shahid, sec. xxii­xxvii; trans. Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), at pp. 111­5; but compare the Book of the Himyarites, ch. XXII. See also below, n. 88.

54. Simeon of Beth Arsham, sec. xxii; trans. Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 111. Both here and at sec. xxiv, the particular stress on Ruhm standing for martyrdom echoes a motif from the accounts of the Edessan Martyrs, playing on the root q-w-m, which underlies the words for standing, covenant, and resurrection. In Syriac, this root provides a crucial link between the most basic notions of baptism, asceticism, and martyrdom. See Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "The Edessan Martyrs and Ascetic Tradition," V Symposium Syriacum 1988, ed. René Lavenant, Orientalia Christiana Analecta 236 (Rome: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1990), 195­206.

55. Simeon of Beth Arsham, sec. xxii­xxiv. The passage employs the highly stylized rhetoric used for such statements since classical times and utilized by Christian writers as additional justification for virginity. Consider, for example, the laments over women's lot that Euripides places in the mouth of Medea. See S. C. Humphreys, "The Family in Classical Athens: Search for a Perspective," in idem, The Family, Women, and Death: Comparative Studies, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), at 71­74. Compare Gregory of Nyssa, "On Virginity," ed. Virginia W. Callahan, in Gregorii Nysseni Opera, ed. Werner Jaeger , Vol. 8.i, Opera Ascetica (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1952), trans. Virginia Callahan, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Ascetical Works, Fathers of the Church 58 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 6­75; and the anonymous fourth-century homily, "On Virginity," trans. Theresa M. Shaw, in Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush (Minneapolis, Fortress Press: 1990), 29­44.

56. Simeon of Beth Arsham, sec. xxiv; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 115.

57. Simeon of Beth Arsham, sec. xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi; Brock and Harvey,Holy Women, 111, 112, 113.

58. Simeon of Beth Arsham, sec. xxiii­xxv; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 112­3.

59. Patlagean, Pauvreté économique et pauvreté sociale, 113­55; idem, "Sur la limitation de la fécondité dans la haute époque byzantine," Annales: e.s.c. 24 (1969): 1353­69 (5 "Birth Control in the Early Byzantine Empire," Biology of Man in History, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum [Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975], 1­22); Herlihy, Medieval Households, 21­23.

60. John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, ch. 12,Patrologia Orientalis 17: 166­86; trans. Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 124­33.

61. See above, nn. 30 and 31.

62. Patrologia Orientalis 17:175; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 128.

63. Patrologia Orientalis 17:182; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 131.

64. I deliberately employ the term "familial partner" rather than "sister." "Sister" is currently a term with strong popular meaning, which we cannot impose on the ancient family; indeed, we have not studied what the term might mean for the ancients.

65. Patrologia Orientalis 17:177­9; Brock and Harvey,Holy Women, 128­29.

66. Cf. Herlihy, Medieval Households, 21­23 on women's "careers" as an alternative to marriage in late antiquity.

67. Patrologia Orientalis 17:184; Brock and Harvey, HolyWomen, 132.

68. Often privileged over those by blood kinship, following, e.g., the models in Mark 3:31­35 and Luke 14:26. See above all Evelyne Patlagean, "Christianisation et parentés rituelles: Le domaine de Byzance," in idem, Structure sociale, famille, chrétienté, ch. XII (5 "Christianization and Ritual Kinship in the Byzantine Area," in Ritual, Religion, and the Sacred, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982], 81­94). Patlagean gives particular attention to kinship by baptism and spiritual brotherhood, with emphasis on the legal ramifications. Her cases focus on male spiritual relationships.

69. Irene: BHO, 538; BHG, 952y­954d. I follow the Syriac text in John the Stylite of Beth-Mar-Qanun, Select Narrations of Holy Women, ed. and tr. Agnes Smith Lewis, Studia Sinaitica Vol. 9 (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1900): [123]­[194], and Vol. 10: 94­148. Irene's legend, probably dating from the fifth century and probably of oriental origin, is part of the cycle associated with the legend of Joseph and Aseneth. See C. Burchard, Untersuchungen zu Joseph und Aseneth (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965), 134­37; and Marc Philonenko, Joseph et Aséneth (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 110­17.

70. Studia Sinaitica 9: [132] (5 10:100). The text at this point plays upon the key ascetical terms îhîdayûtâ, "solitude" and the root m-k-k, denoting humility, thereby identifying Irene's as yet pagan ascetic life with the Christian life she will take on by her baptism.

71. Studia Sinaitica 9: [138] (5 10:106).

72. Adoption, fostering, and other nonbiologically based relationships did not alter the nature of mother-child responsibilities in the Roman or early Byzantine household. Cf. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 53­179.

73. For historical counterparts where the daughter served as spiritual mother to her own mother, compare, e.g., the relationships between Macrina and her mother Emmelia, and Melania the Younger and her mother Albina. Gregory of Nyssa, Vita S. Macrinae, ed. Virginia W. Callahan, in Gregorii Nysseni Opera, 8, i, 347­414, esp. sec. 5, where Macrina vows never to leave her mother; and the Vita S. Melaniae Iun., ed. Denys Gorce, Vie de Sainte Mélanie, Sources Chrétiennes 90 (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1962), esp. sec. 25, 33, and 36. Cf. also Melania the Younger's relationship with her husband Pinian: once they have taken their ascetic vows, the hagiographer calls them brother and sister, and Melania calls herself Pinian's spiritual mother and sister; see the Vita, sec. 8.

74. Febronia: BHO, 302­303; BHG, 659. I follow the Syriac vita, ed. Paul Bedjan, Acta Martyrtum et Sanctorum 5:573­615; trans. Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 150­76.

75. Compare, e.g., the descriptions of convent life in the vitae of Macrina and Melania the Younger (above, n. 73), and of Matrona of Constantinople, BHG, 1221­23, for which see Eva Catafygiotou Topping, "St. Matrona and Her Friends: Sisterhood in Byzantium," in Kathegetria: Essays Presented to Joan Hussey on her Eightieth Birthday, ed. J. Chrysostomides (London: Porphyrogenitus Press, 1989), 211­24; also Palladius, The Lausiac History, ed. and trans. Cuthbert Butler (Cambridge: The University Press, 1898­1904), ch. 59.

76. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum 5:586; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 160.

77. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum 5:585, 590, 595; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 159­60, 162, 165. Bryene's speech in sec. 14 plays on marriage and covenant, qyamâ, echoing the constellation of meanings around the root q-w-m noted in the case of Ruhm and in the Edessan Martyr cycle, above n. 54.

78. Compare Cameron, "Virginity as Metaphor."

79. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum 5:607; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 172.

80. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum 5:610; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 174.

81. Studia Sinaitica 9: [124­7] (5 10:95­7).

82. One recalls Macrina's vow never to be separated from her mother Emmelia. Above, n. 73.

83. Patrologia Orientalis 17:185­6; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 132­3.

84. Studia Sinaitica 9: [139] (5 10:145).

85. Euphemia and the Goth, sec. 5 and sec. 34.

86. The motif of sexual torture is common in the passions of women martyrs, although it barely figures in the accounts of men who were martyred. For examples, see, e.g., Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, VIII.12.3, 14, and idem, Martyrs of Palestine, 5.3, 7.2, trans. in H. J. Lawlor and J. E. L. Olton, Eusebius of Caesarea, The Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine (London: S.P.C.K., 1954); the passion of Candida, above n. 36; the passions of Anahid, Mahya, and Febronia, trans. in Brock and Harvey, Holy Women; Palladius, Lausiac History, 3, 65. Barbara and Agatha are also notable in this regard, especially for their iconographic representations in Western art. See Harvey, "Women in Early Byzantine Hagiography."

87. Bedjan, Acta Martyrum et Sanctorum 5: 613; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 175.

88. Simeon of Beth Arsham, sec. xxvi; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 114. In his edition of the Martyrs of Najran, esp. at pp. 177­79, Shahid suggests that among the sources influencing the Najran texts, the Maccabean literature is an obvious consideration. Certainly, the parallels with IV Maccabees in particular would have quickly sprung to mind for the Syrian audience, on whom that text made an early and lasting impact: see R. L. Bensly and W. E. Barnes, The Fourth Book of Maccabees and Kindred Documents in Syriac (Cambridge 1895). In fact, the parallels between Ruhm and the mother of the Maccabees are striking for their differences as much as their similarities: Ruhm's forceful dominance of the whole situation, her decision to take herself and her daughters to their deaths, the drinking of their blood, and her own death by torture all stand vividly in contrast to the less obtrusive (if no less courageous) actions of the Maccabean mother. For an excellent commentary on the latter, see Stanley K. Stowers, "4 Maccabees," in Harper's Bible Commentary, ed. J. L. Mays (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988), 922­34; and Robin Darling Young, " 'The Woman with the Soul of Abraham': Traditions about the Mother of the Maccabean Martyrs," in Levine, "Women Like This," 67­82.

89. Physical virginity in relation to purity codes was not a static concept for the ancient Mediterranean world. See Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). The notion that physical virginity did not guarantee purity of faith was a commonplace in the Church Fathers. For a discussion of interior virginity as present in Syriac tradition, see Sebastian P. Brock, Spirituality in the Syriac Tradition, Moran 'Eth'o 2 (Kottayam: S. Ephrem Ecumenical Research Institute, 1989), 89­93.

90. Cf. Cameron, "Virginity as Metaphor."

91. Studia Sinaitica 9: [155] (510:118­19).

92. On wife battering and slave abuse, compare., e.g., Canon 5 of the Council of Elvira, for which see Samuel Laeuchli, Power and Sexuality: The Emergence of Canon Law and the Synod of Elvira (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972); Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, IX.9, ed. CCL 27; and earlier, Valerius Maximus, Factorum et Dictorum Memorabilium, ed. C. Kempf (Leipzig 1888; repr. Stuttgart, 1966), 6.3.9, and Juvenal, Satires, rev. ed. and trans. G. G. Ramsay, LCL (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 6.475­93. For the background on the treatment of slaves, see Paul Veyne, "The Roman Empire," in idem, History of Private Life I, esp. at pp. 51­93; and Keith Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

93. E.g., Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, VIII.12.3, 14; idem, Martyrs of Palestine, 5.3, 7.2.

94. Patrologia Orientalis 17:182­83; Brock and Harvey, Holy Women, 131­32.

95. Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, 155­88.

96. Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity, 3 ("simple adventures stories which have love, travel, and violence as their main constituents").

97. All five stories considered here imply that the private relationship between these mothers and daughters is one of parity, in a shared life of religious devotion. Only the public relationship is shown as having a hierarchical structure of authoritative mother and obedient daughter. This model of women's parity within their private domain contrasts sharply with the findings of Nikki Stiller, Eve's Orphans: Mothers and Daughters in Medieval English Literature (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980). Stiller's study relies primarily on a psychoanalytic model of cultural interpretation. She finds that most relationships between female characters in medieval English literature conform to the hierarchical pattern of an older, more authoritative mother figure and a younger, more helpless daughter figure, with the two operating in a relationship of mutual distrust and rivalry. The contrast in type is striking, and may be indicative of the cultural shifts in meaning for the family between the period of late antiquity and the high middle ages. Clarissa W. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), while considering changing cultural constructions of motherhood, does not consider the specific qualities of mother-son or mother-daughter relationships.