Listen to Her: Women as Avatars of Wisdom in Late Ancient Homiletical Discourse

Abstract

ABSTRACT For some decades now, historians have focused on attending to or, where possible, retrieving women's voices. In late antiquity, as indeed in other pre-modern eras, this salutary interest has encountered numerous challenges, including in many instances late ancient writers’ interest in obscuring, circumscribing, or otherwise silencing these voices. Ancient authors from Homer onward praised women's silence and worried about women's overly public speech. Early Christians had perhaps more reason for concern than many of their contemporaries; after all, as patristic writers liked to remind their audiences, it was the first woman's dubious counsel that had misled Adam and had put an end to humanity's paradisiacal existence. It is all the more striking when women's voices do emerge as authoritative purveyors of wisdom in late ancient texts, particularly where those voices are depicted as preferable to male wisdom. This article examines three such instances: that of a mother whose teaching discredits a tyrant in Gregory of Nazianzus’ Discourse 15; of a daughter whose insight bests her father's in Isaac's sogitha on the daughter of Jephthah; and that of a wife whose wisdom saves both husband and son in a homily on Abraham and Isaac attributed to Amphilochium of Iconium. The women in these homilies emerge in contexts of crisis—their own violent death or the actual or threatened death of their offspring—and in these homilies become central to these crises’ resolution. In the process, they emerge as avatars of wisdom for late ancient homilists and their audiences. While these texts and the characters narrated in them do not grant access to the voices of historical women, they nevertheless allow readers glimpses into the distinctive shape of women's wisdom in early Christian writings and the discourses surrounding it.