The Agency of Christian Women and the Female Threat to Episcopal Power in Fourth Century Rome

Abstract

This contribution sets the Christian widows in Rome in the late fourth century CE and their agency within their social milieu: the Roman elite. In doing so, it argues (a) that the agency of these widows built on class-specific dispositions rather than genuinely ‘female’ or religious dispositions, and (b) that such agency allowed these women to establish a network of influence and power that even threatened the episcopal power.