Regulating Holiness: Female Asceticism and Ecclesiastical Authority in Early Christianity

This presentation explores early Christian asceticism through a gendered lens, focusing on how fasting, celibacy, and withdrawal from traditional roles subverted gender in late antiquity. Roman society stressed marriage, domesticity, and familial lineage, but female ascetics undercut these norms by practicing celibacy, rejecting wealth, and pursuing holiness through bodily discipline. For women, asceticism offered escape from social constraints in gender roles. Hagiographical accounts described these women in terms that blurred gender norms, attributing masculine virtues as masculine or referring to them as male. While scholars have examined women’s roles in early Christian asceticism, female saints are often treated as peripheral to a male-centered ascetic tradition or focused primarily on themes of virginity. This project builds on that scholarship by emphasizing how women such as Macrina, Syncletica, and Mary of Egypt were portrayed as transcending gender categories. By highlighting the ways in which female ascetic practice destabilized cultural definitions of gender roles, the study reframes women not as exceptions but as central in the redefinition of holiness in late antiquity.