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Signature: _____________________________ ______________ Kate Wilkinson Spectacular Modesty The Self-representation of Ascetic Noblewomen in the Context of the Pelagian Controversy By Kate Wilkinson Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Division of Religion Historical Studies _________________________________________ [Advisor’s signature] Lewis Ayres Advisor _________________________________________ [Member’s signature] Joyce Flueckiger Committee Member _________________________________________ [Member’s signature] Richard Valantasis Committee Member _________________________________________ [Member’s signature] Philip Rousseau Committee Member Accepted: _________________________________________ Lisa A. Tedesco, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School ___________________ Date Spectacular Modesty The Self-representation of Ascetic Noblewomen in the Context of the Pelagian Controversy By Kate Wilkinson B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, 2000 M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School, 2002 Advisor: Lewis Ayres, Ph.D An abstract of A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Division of Religion Historical Studies 2009 Abstract Spectacular Modesty The Self-representation of Ascetic Noblewomen in the Context of the Pelagian Controversy By Kate Wilkinson This dissertation is a feminist historical exercise that argues that modesy among ascetic noblewomen of the late fourth and early fifth centuries AD provided opportunities for the exercise of women’s agency. Using primary material addressed to the women of the Anicii family by the Christian ascetic thinkers Augustine, Jerome, and Pelagius, this study explores modesty as a series of performances. Comparative material from contemporary ethnographies of women in South Asia functions to reveal the potentially rich forms of being implied by ‘conventional’ advice on modesty. After exploring external modest performance in dress, domesticity, and speech, the study turns to the interior of modesty and looks at questions of hypocrisy and of congruence between disposition and performance. Lastly the dissertation puts feminist concerns about women’s ‘agency’ into conversation with the conflicting theologies of human and divine agency of the Pelagian controversy. Spectacular Modesty The Self-representation of Ascetic Noblewomen in the Context of the Pelagian Controversy By Kate Wilkinson B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, 2000 M.T.S., Harvard Divinity School, 2002 Advisor: Lewis Ayres, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Division of Religion Historical Studies 2009 Acknowledgments So neither the one who plants nor the one who sows is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 1 Cor. 3:7 I have been gifted with a great deal of help along the way. My thanks first to my advisor, Lewis, my Emory committee members, Joyce and Richard, and to my very kind external reader, Dr. Rousseau. Thank you all for being there when I needed you and for not being there the rest of the time. Few committees have the generosity to let students truly figure things out on their own, and I am very lucky to have had both your encouragement and your trust. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Mellon Foundation and the members of the Mellon Dissertation Seminar at Emory during the spring and summer of 2008 for crucial financial support and even more crucial moral support in the middle of the writing process. Three sharp non-specialist readers and generally amazing women have been through the whole journey with me, intellectually and emotionally: my mother Sarah and my friends Marina and Melissa. Thank you for inordinate amounts of sympathy, patience, laughter, gossip, advice, and love. Finally, I thank those who have helped me keep body, soul, and mind together over the past two years: Russell Tobe, Mindy Frankel, and Augusta. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Note on Sources, Translations, and Abbreviations 6 Chapter One Proba, Juliana, and Demetrias Act Modestly: Material and Methodology of the Dissertation 7 Chapter Two Apparel, Identity, and Agency: Demetrias Dresses Herself 36 Chapter Three Publicity and Domesticity 75 Chapter Four The Modest Mouth 112 Chapter Five Performance Anxiety: Hypocrisy and Sincerity in the Performance of Modesy 150 Chapter Six Modest Agencies 179 Conclusion 206 Bibliography 209 1 Introduction Goths invaded Rome in 410 AD, and like many aristocratic families, a household of three wealthy, senatorial women fled across the Mediterranean to their land holdings in North Africa. Proba and her daughter-in-law Juliana, both widows, traveled with Juliana’s daughter Demetrias. Three years later all were consecrated women, their household a refuge for ascetic Christian women of different ranks. The two elder widows and the young virgin formed the center of a religious community of extraordinary wealth and influence. They were the recipients of a plethora of missives from important Christian thinkers that combined ascetic and theological advice with competitive moves to secure the household’s considerable material and moral patronage.1 Many of the recommendations to the Anicii women are not unique to the Christian ascetic movement, but fall into the category of entirely conventional Roman expectations for virtuous, upper-class women. They are recommendations to be discreet, well-covered, domestic, gentle, retiring, frugal; they are recommendations to be modest. Using the body of material addressed to the women of the Anicii family by the theologians and ascetic theorists Augustine, Jerome, and Pelagius as my central body of evidence, I argue that 1 Peter Brown, "The Patrons of Pelagius: The Roman Aristocracy between East and West," The Journal of Theological Studies XXI (1970), Peter Brown, "Pelagius and His Supporters: Aims and Environments," Religion and Society in the Age of Augustine (New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972), Anne Kurdoch, "Demetrias Ancilla Dei: Anicia Demetrias and the Problem of the Missing Patron," Religion, Dynasty, and Patronage in Early Christian Rome, 300-900, eds. Kate Cooper and Julia Hillner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Anne Kurdoch, "The Anician Women: Patronage and Dynastic Strategy in a Late Roman Domus, 350-600 C.E.," University of Manchester, 2003. 2 modesty, despite its conventionality, was a creative and performative2 mode of being for late Roman Christian ascetic women, an opportunity for women’s agency. This agency was not a coherent capacity that can be defined in contemporary terms or ancient theories of the will/self but was a part of the women’s evolving self-understanding in the context of heated debated over freedom in virtuous action. I begin with an understanding of modesty as a range of activities that includes veiling, seclusion, restraint in dress, modified speech or silence, and highly controlled comportment. Modesty, then and now, also implied an internal disposition. I address this potential interior aspect of modesty after examining aspects of the outward enactment of modest behavior. To support my analyses of modesty as an active and performative enterprise, I draw on the work of feminist ethnographers who have studied similarly ‘traditional’, ‘conservative’ or ‘normative’ phenomena among women in non-western contexts. Both the work of these ethnographers and my own goes against the grain of feminist scholarship that focuses on women’s resistances to oppressive normative expectations3 rather than the processes of embodying the cultural ideal. Focusing on the latter challenges the assumption of what anthropologist Saba Mahmood calls ‘the subject of freedom’4, the self who only manifests as a fully aware agent when she resists or subverts patriarchal norms. 2 Here I indicate only a mode of being comprised partly of performances. I will distinguish the language of ‘performance studies’ from that of Judith Butler’s ‘performativity’ below. Both contribute to the critical vocabulary of the dissertation as a whole. 3 For a good example of feminist anthropology using the category of ‘resistance’: Judith Okely, "Defiant Moments: Gender, Resistance and Individuals (Phyllis Kayberry Memorial Lecture)," Man (N.S.) 26 (1989). 4 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). 1-39. 3 Placing modesty under the rubric of agency, implying choice and activity, or of performance, implying intentionality and conscious framing, also assumes a particular kind of subject, if not exactly the Western enlightenment subject whose basic desire is for freedom. It assumes a subject who has and who values