Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles

by Gillian Clark

Hardcover, 1993

Status

Available

Call number

822

Genres

Collection

Gifts

Publication

Oxford University Press (1993), Edition: 1st, 188 pages

Description

This book bridges a gap between two traditional disciplines. Since the 1970s, there has been a remarkable outpouring of work on women in antiquity, but women in late antiquity (3rd-6th centuries A.D.) have been far less studied. Classicists have been more concerned with the first two centuries A.D., and theologians have been interested in New Testament, rather than patristic, teaching about women or its social and cultural setting. In this book, Clark offers an introduction to the basic conditions of life for women: marriage, divorce, celibacy and prostitution; legal constraints and protection; child-bearing, health care, and medical theories; housing, housework, and clothes; and the general assumptions about female nature which were discarded at need. Christian and non-Christian literature, art, and archaeology are used to exemplify both the practicalities of life and the prevailing "discourses" of the ancient world.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member LudieGrace

This book impressed me more than I thought it would. It is, as far as I know, the only survey out there on women in late antiquity (roughly 3rd through late 6th centuries). Clark looks at patristic texts concerning women against the Greco-Roman cultural background, covering topics such as marriage,

divorce, childbearing, domesticity, health, and philosophical and theological attitudes toward women's personhood. As a survey, it doesn't get into great depth, and by the nature of the sources, it leaves plenty of unanswered questions. She refrains from much evaluative commentary, but her conclusions--that Christianity probably did expand women's horizons and raise their dignity (particularly that of poor women), but that Christian teaching could be used either to reinforce or to subvert Greco-Roman conventions--seems to accord with what I've seen in early Christian writings. I was particularly interested in Clark's research on attitudes to abortion. It's roundly condemned in Christian writings (with perhaps a minority who held to Hippocratic views of the fetus before quickening), though in Fathers like Basil, there is mercy shown to repentant women.

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