Innovating Traditional Womens Roles Byza

Modern Theology Month 2019 DOI:10.1111/moth.
12538
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
INNOVATING “TRADITIONAL” WOMEN’S

ROLES: BYZANTINE INSIGHTS FOR
ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN GENDER
DISCOURSE
ASHLEY PURPURA
Abstract
Some contemporary hierarchically endorsed statements about gender within Orthodox Christianity appeal to “traditional
roles” for women. Byzantine hagiographies about women, however, often confound the stability suggested by such
rhetoric, and offer a more open “tradition” of Orthodox Christians celebrating diverse and boundary-breaking forms
of women’s sanctity (even if via negation of their womanhood). Although these texts betray an unabashedly historical
patriarchal perspective, they also can be read as using gender, via an almost apophatic dialectic, to convey theological
values that challenge essentialist associations between specific vocations, authoritative positions, and particular sexes.
As hagiography is an influential genre for Orthodox beliefs and practices, the ways hagiographers negotiate and depict
gender should inform understandings of gender in Orthodox “tradition.”
Introduction
Orthodox Christianity is unapologetically patriarchal. An exclusively male priesthood leads
Orthodox churches and sacraments, Orthodox worship and theology confess God as “Father,”
and Orthodox theologians and hierarchs appeal to an authoritative “patristic” tradition. Such
prioritization of the “fathers” in the Orthodox Church historically developed patriarchal privi-
lege, and was developed by it.1 Patriarchy also marks public contemporary Orthodox Christian
discourse in the ways some of its hierarchical leaders and ecclesially sponsored publications
speak about women, situate Orthodoxy in opposition to the perceived dangers of “feminism,”
and triumphantly juxtapose Orthodox Christianity over and against other religious
Ashley Purpura
Purdue University, Religious Studies Program, 500 Oval Drive, Room G34D, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA
Email: apurpur@purdue.edu
1
For discussion of the ramifications of patristic theology for patriarchal privilege and re-conceiving manhood, see
Virginia Burrus, “Begotten, Not Made”: Conceiving Manhood in Late Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2000); and on historical patriarchy in contemporary Orthodoxy, see Leonie Liveris, Ancient Taboos and Gender
Prejudice: Challenges for Orthodox Women and the Church (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005).
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

2 Ashley Purpura
denominations that have female leadership.2 Specifically, in several instances, contemporary

ecclesial discourse either overtly or more subtly invokes women’s “traditional roles” in ways
that (perhaps inadvertently) prescriptively essentialize women and the activities they may ful-
fill in being Orthodox.3
Some remarks by twenty-first century Orthodox leaders and gatherings of Orthodox bishops
appear to assume that the Orthodox position is that although women and men function differ-
ently in the world, they are equal, and their separate roles and social positions are divinely or-
dered.4 Accordingly, several public statements by modern Orthodox hierarchs praise women for
maintaining traditional domestic and maternal priorities, and assuming subordinate and sup-
porting ecclesial roles. Some statements with urgent directness even encourage the mainte-
nance of traditional social and familial gender hierarchies as central to maintaining Orthodoxy.5
Although socio-cultural perspectives often inflect such statements more so than theology, their
presentation by authoritatively vested church leaders suggests these viewpoints are representa-
tive of Orthodox beliefs and consistent with Orthodox tradition.6 Such gender essentialism has
only recently begun to be interrogated by Orthodox scholars, while the effects of an essential-
izing perspective on Orthodox rhetoric are pervasive.7 Attempts at realizing additional ways
women might fulfill their vocations within Orthodoxy and expanding women’s ministerial
functions, for example by reinstituting the female deaconate, are topics routinely met with po-
larizing controversy.8
2
For examples, see Igor Tabakov, “Feminism is Very Dangerous, Patriarch Kyrill Says,” The Moscow Times, April
11, 2013, https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/feminism-is-very-dangerous-patriarch-kirill-says-23137;
“Mитpoпoлит Илapиoн oтвepг oбвинeния в диcкpиминaции жeнщин внyтpи Пpaвocлaвнoй цepкви,” Interfax
Religion, March 25, 2013, http://inter fax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=67224.
3
For example, see Bishop Nicholas, “The Role of Women in the Orthodox Church,” The Self-Ruled Antiochian
Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, May 2, 2013, http://www.antiochian.org/role-women-orthodox-church;
Metropolitan Seraphim of Johannesburg and Pretoria, “The Role of Women in the Church,” Orthodox Research
Institute, 2017, http://www.orthodoxresearchinstitute.org/articles/misc/seraphim_role_of_women.html; and the com-
ments of Bishop Petar of Prespa-Bitola noted by Sinisa Jakov Marusic, “Macedonian Bishop Blames Women for
Failed Marriages,” Balkan Insight, May 7, 2013, https://balkaninsight.com/2013/05/07/macedonian-cleric-blames-
women-for-failed-marriages.
4
“The Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today’s World,” Official Documents of the Holy and Great Council of
the Orthodox Church, June 26, 2016, https://www.holycouncil.org/-/mission-orthodox-church-todays-world; also “
Opinion of the Holy Synod on the Occasion of the Istanbul Convention,” Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox
Church, January 22, 2018, http://www.bg-patriarshia.bg/news.php?id=254101.
5
See the examples from Patriarch Kyrill, Metropolitan Alfeyev, and Bishop Nicholas in notes 2 and 3 above. For
pastoral summary of several positions in the discussion, and with a more moderate approach still imbued with patri-
archal and essentializing assumptions, see Archbishop Chrysostomos, “Women in the Orthodox Church,” Orthodox
Life 31 (1981): 34-41.
6
On the complexity of Orthodox tradition and determining it, see John Meyendorff, Living Tradition (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1978), 21; John McGuckin, “Eschaton and Kerygma: The Future of the Past in the
Present Kairos.” [The Concept of Living Tradition in Orthodox Theology] St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42,
no. 3-4 (1998): 225-71; Sergius Bulgakov, “Chapter 2: The Church as Tradition” in The Orthodox Church (Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 254, 267; and Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church (New York: Penguin
Books, 1993), 253-55. On the influence of social, political, and cultural circumstance on shifting religious gender roles
and examples of how women navigate them, see Nadieszda Kizenko, “Feminized Patriarchy? Orthodoxy and Gender
in Post-Soviet Russia,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 3 (2013): 595-621. See the related
survey data on views related to gender roles that reflect a range of views along national lines in “Orthodox Take
Socially Conservative Views on Gender Issues, Homosexuality,” in Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century by the
Pew Research Center: Religion and Public Life, November 8, 2017, http://www.pewforum.org/2017/11/08/orthodox-
take-socially-conservative-views-on-gender-issues-homosexuality/.
7
Bryce Rich, “Beyond Male and Female: Gender Essentialism and Orthodoxy,” PhD diss., University of Chicago,
2017.
8
“Letter on the Deaconess Debate,” Orthodox Theological Society of America, February 2, 2018, http://www.
otsamerica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/OTSALetterFeb2018.pdf.

Innovating “Traditional” Women’s Roles 3
Despite some modern Orthodox leaders’ appeals to “tradition” to justify the limited and
pre-determined opportunities they envision for women, with this article I suggest there are
resources within Orthodox sacred “tradition” that point towards a more fluid understanding
of the relationship between one’s sex and gender performance. Specifically, Byzantine hagi-
ography speaks about women’s holiness in a more resourceful and open way, compared to
several statements regarding gender by modern Orthodox hierarchs. Byzantine hagiography
is a historical source informing many modern Orthodox traditions upon which other sacred
sources and significant developments depend—such as iconography, homiletics, service read-
ings, festal celebrations, hymnography, patron saint names, relic veneration, and pilgrimage. As
Byzantine hagiography is deeply influential in Orthodox tradition and develops as a central part
of it, any claims about gender that purport to speak on behalf of Orthodox tradition should be
informed by it. While contemporary Orthodox discourse includes prominent examples of hier-
archs speaking about women definitively, deterministically, and as ecclesial participants whose
vocational possibilities are sexually restricted, I suggest Byzantine hagiographers construct
saints’ lives in ways that confound and overcome the assumed limitations and social positions
that are frequently associated with the female sex. Consequently, in what follows, I provide
analysis of several gender-based hagiographical motifs to argue for an Orthodox “tradition” of
women’s holiness where women do not fit neatly into specific “roles,” and are not limited to
fulfilling gender specific functions in socially expected ways.
Approach
Admittedly, the patriarchal concerns and ideals voiced in reaction to contemporary circum-
stances and the status of living women differ significantly from the historical patriarchal con-
cerns and ideals communicated when hagiographies commemorate sainted and holy women. In
contrast to present pastoral rhetoric, hagiography can retrospectively negotiate the parameters
of the saint’s holiness through a spiritually didactic and controlled narrative. Byzantine hagiog-
raphies diverge from contemporary conversations about women that often focus on how women
are to be Orthodox, by instead starting with the assumption that the female saints are already
Orthodox and holy—focusing rather on negotiating, celebrating, and disrupting assumptions
about how they are, or are not, women.9 Nevertheless, the hagiographical genre is still highly
influential for setting forth models of holiness even hagiographers themselves describe as wor-
thy of emulation. Thus, hagiography is not irrelevant for shaping possibilities for still-living
Orthodox women’s religious expressions.10
Byzantine hagiography that speaks about holy women in “manly” terms, or that relies on
problematic ideals about women, does not need to be read only as a type of historical misogyny
or preference for masculinity. In what follows, I suggest the seemingly negative ways that hagi-
ographers address women and femininity can be read as a type of gender apophasis (unsaying).
The denial or transformation of a holy woman’s gender provides insight into traditional concep-
tions about women’s spiritual lives and opportunities that is surprisingly expansive.11 The
9
Discussion on the impossibility of a holy woman in Byzantine hagiography can be found in Susan Ashbrook
Harvey, “Chapter 3: Women in Byzantine Hagiography,” in That Gentle Strength, edited by L. Coon (Charlottesville,
VA: University of Virginia Press, 1990), 36-59.
10
For the influence of gender on shaping hagiographical genre see Stavroula Constantinou, “Subgenre and Gender
in Saints’ Lives,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies (2004):411-23, and in terms of more broadly undertaking the
act of writing hagiography as a spiritual exercise, see Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship
in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
11
On apophatic traditions, see Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1994).

4 Ashley Purpura
observation of Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller that, “apophasis . . . targets our false knowl-
edge, the idols formed in our confusion of the finite with the infinite,” I suggest, can be applied
to the boundaries and assumptions associated with gender in Byzantine hagiographical texts.
Indeed, as Sarah Coakley has insightfully described an “apophatic turn” that involves “a strange
subversion of all certainties,” and “a stripping, often painful of what one previously took for
granted,” with regard to divine contemplation and theology, I offer that such a turn may also be
useful for reexamining hagiographical gender as the vehicle for communicating divine power
among humanity.12 Some authors of Byzantine hagiographical narratives transgress and rhetor-
ically unsay gender boundaries in order to communicate the female saints’ divine likeness.13 By
adapting Luce Irigaray’s insight regarding patriarchal discourse’s inability to name women
(because in this case Byzantine women have a “not one-ness” with regard to holiness), I posit a
theological resourcefulness of this otherwise gender negating aspect of hagiography.14 Scholars
such as Amy Hollywood, Catherine Keller, and Ann-Marie Priest have convincingly drawn on
Irigaray to engage medieval mystical writings fruitfully in light of a type of textual, gender-re-
lated, apophasis.15 Likewise, Patricia Cox Miller has highlighted the use of apophasis of the
material and transcendent in late antique hagiographies, in order to communicate holiness.16
Consequently, in what follows, I suggest a similar tension holds together the presentation of
female saints as both “neither-nor” and “both-and” in terms of gender, to express infinite divine
power and presence through a finite female character.17
Although apophasis as a rhetorical device applies in some instances to the sources I will
discuss, I also have in mind the Byzantine Orthodox apophatic theological tradition as indicated
by the writings attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. Within this conception of apophasis, a
plethora of signifiers is applied and negated, in order to praise (name) God. Accordingly,
through contemplating “dissimilar similarities” and participating in a process of “unknowing”
by negating assertions of holiness in expected terms and expected bodies, the reader of hagiog-
raphy may be moved spiritually forward.18 Relatedly, Charles Stang keenly posits a type of
Dionysian apophatic anthropology whereby the self is unsaid in solicitation of the divine—a
12
Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 312, 342.
13
Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (eds.), “Introduction,” Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation,
and Relationality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5.
14
Luce Irigaray, This Sex That is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).
15
See the creative theologically constructive approach to using apophasis to rethink gender and religion in
Catherine Keller, “The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Unsaying of Feminist Theology,” Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 76, no. 4 (2008): 905-33; Amy Hollywood, “Deconstructing Belief: Irigaray and the Philosophy
of Religion,” The Journal of Religion 78, no. 2 (1998): 230-45, idem, “Beauvoir, Irigaray, and the Mystical,” Hypatia
9, no. 4 (1994):158-85: Ann-Marie Priest, “Woman as God, God as Woman: Mysticism, Negative Theology, and Luce
Irigaray,” The Journal of Religion 83, no. 1 (2003): 1-23.
16
Patricia Cox Miller, “Subtle Embodiments: Imagining the Holy in Late Antiquity,” in Apophatic Bodies:
Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, edited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), 45-58.
17
Ibid., 57.
18
Dionysius Areopagite, Corpus Dionysiacum, edited by B. R. Suchla, G. Heil, and A. M. Ritter, Patristische
Texte und Studien 33-36 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1987-1990). For a standard (albeit not uncontested) English translation,
see Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, translated by Colm Luibhéid and Paul Rorem, The Classics of Western
Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987); see also the insightful discussion in Jeffrey Fisher, "The Theology of Dis/
similarity: Negation in Pseudo-Dionysius," The Journal of Religion 81, no. 4 (2001): 529-48; and Charles Stang, “The
Apophatic Anthropology of Dionysius,” in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality,
edited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 59-76.

dynamic that I offer could be at play in andromimetic female saint stories.19 With the Byzantine
saints’ lives I draw upon, I suggest a comparable type of textually and spiritually instrumental
apophasis of gender. I submit that the patriarchal celebration of holy women specifically through
depictions that negate their identification as “women” textually, or are predicated on the read-
er’s negation of the possibility of a holy woman as woman, reveal a divine presence and reality
that confounds human gendered expectations, temporal-social conceptions, and the limits of
language.20 The words of Irigaray, “woman is not to be related to any simple designatable being,
subject, or entity . . . woman is a common noun for which no identity can be defined,” although
obviously not directed at Byzantine hagiographical writings, could nevertheless illumine our
understandings of many gendered examples from Byzantine hagiographies.21 I qualify, how-
ever, that the indefinable “no identity” of women—one that cannot be sufficiently discursively
named, due to the androcentric privileging associated with characteristics of holiness, in light
of the Orthodox apophatic tradition, and the links made by feminist scholars between apophasis
and expressing female holiness—could be read in the hagiographical context as a negative iden-
tity that serves to convey the presence of God.22 I am not trying to overstate the claims that can
be made from overtly patriarchal sources; these hagiographies often speak more to the concerns
of their male creators and sustainers than the factual and experiential lives of real women.23
Instead, I am suggesting the ways women as women are elided and reconfigured in Byzantine
texts can be read as a type of conceptual apophasis to reveal a more open and undefined (in
contrast to instances of contemporary “traditional gender roles” rhetoric) ideal of what consti-
tutes the Orthodox performance of “woman” as a category of holiness.24 Coakley’s keen obser-
vation amid her own discussion of feminist theology and Trinitarian contemplation, that “the
true ‘apophatic’ is not just a verbal play . . . it is ‘mystical theology’ itself, in Dionysius’ terms,”
may also find resonances with the disclosure of holiness through the hagiographical medium.25
Therefore, such a genre of historical religious writing can be read as wrestling with the limits
of language to convey divine power and presence—resorting to a type of inadvertent apophatic
and negative theological communication to overcome the presumed bounds of gender.
19
Charles Stang, “The Apophatic Anthropology of Dionysius,” 64-65.
20
See a related discussion on apophasis as one of many devices used by hagiographers to “unsay” and “speak
away” saints’ material bodies and identifications of the transcendent in Patricia Cox Miller, “Subtle Embodiments:
Imagining the Holy in Late Antiquity,” in Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, ed-
ited by Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 45-58. Miller notes that these
techniques reveal the saint’s bodies as “neither-nor (which is also a both-and),” a “tensive balance” that I suggest is
similarly at play with regard to the categories of gender (57, 52).
21
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985),
230.
22
See n. 14 and 17 above.
23
For discussion on the relation between female subjects and their male authors in hagiography, see Lynda
Garland, Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800-1200 (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), xiv; Elizabeth
Clark, “The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the ‘Linguistic Turn’,” Church History 67, no. 1
(1998): 1–31; David Brakke, “The Lady Appears: Materialization of ‘Woman’ in Early Monastic Literature,” Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 3 (2003): 387-402; Stavroula Constantinou, “Male Constructions of
Female Identities: Authority and Power in the Byzantine Greek Lives of Monastic Foundresses,” Wiener Jahrbuch für
Kunstgeschichte LX/LXI (2014): 41-60; R.S. Kraemer, “When is a Text about a Woman a Text about a Woman? The
Cases of Aseneth and Perpetua,” in A Feminist Companion to Patristic Literature, edited by A.-J. Levine and M. M.
Robbins (London and New York: T and T Clark), 156-72. Also related is Irigaray’s claim that “the feminine occurs
only within models and laws devised by male subjects”; (Irigaray, This Sex, 86).
24
On the performative nature of gender, see the classic Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution:
An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519-31. In a Byzantine context,
see also Stavroula Constatinou, “Performing Gender in Lay Saints’ Lives” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 38
(2014): 24-32.
25
Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, 340.

6 Ashley Purpura
Although it is unlikely the authors of the hagiographical texts intentionally drew on any type
of apophatic theology in order to depict female saints, the negative way they portray varieties of
female holiness nevertheless reveals a tension between values of spiritual equality and the so-
cial constructions of gender. The result, I observe, is that a “holy woman” can be known best
through a type of cataphatic-apophatic gender dialectic. The hagiographer may assert the fe-
male saint is holy, but then denies the saint’s femininity in favor of virtuous masculinity, in
order to render the presence of holiness comprehensible. Yet the saint herself as a gendered
subject brought about by performance is thus neither strictly recognizable as a man nor a
woman, which implicates the limitations of these gendered categories in the performance and
communication of divinization.26 Consequently, negating women’s holiness as women and ren-
dering it in masculine or exceptional (and therefore not fully “womanly”) terms, rather than
merely a vestige of patriarchal perspective and misogyny (although in some instances it is very
much shaped by that!) can also be read as a subtle tradition of resorting to an apophatic-style
approach to convey holiness through gendered terms. Such an interpretive approach prompts a
rethinking of the limits of socialized gender constructions in relation to religious identities,
language as a tool to signify divine likeness, and the relation between Byzantine hagiographical
traditions of speaking about women’s holiness and contemporary ecclesial rhetoric about wom-
en’s “roles.”
Women feature in many hagiographical narratives in diverse ways, so the examples I present
below represent trends that can be found in multiple saints’ lives, sainted stories, hymns, and
versions of these tales. Orthodox iconography and liturgical commemoration also reflect and
interpret these saints and their stories. For the sake of brevity and historical focus, I limit my
examples to those versions written in Greek in the seventh to twelfth centuries (although some
may narratively take place earlier, or may be only slight revisions of much earlier versions), and
that feature women’s holiness portrayed to either invert or confound gender expectations.27 I
certainly acknowledge the variation in the construction of gender that occurs even within the
saintly retelling of this limited period, but suggest that this very fluidity and malleability in-
forms Orthodox tradition in a way that is dynamic rather than static.28 The examples I draw
upon are not outliers at the periphery of Byzantine hagiography, but often represent saint types
and tropes that are repeated across several saints’ lives as indications of holiness. I recognize
that in presenting these “types” to show that there are not particular “roles” for women I admit-
tedly engage a type of “strategic essentialism.” I maintain, however, that these “types” differ
from the contemporary discussion of “roles” in their posture toward gender-based limitation,
and thus function in a different way historically, with the potential to influence future Orthodox
feminist ressourcement.29
26
Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 207. Sells observes that, “Apophatic discourse . . . yields an open-ended
process by which the original assertion of transcendence continually turns back critically upon itself.”
27
Christian Novels from the Menologion of Symeon Metaphrastes, trans. Stratis Papaioannou (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2017); Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, edited by Alice-
Mary Talbot (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996); hereafter these translations
will be abbreviated with Christian Novels and Holy Women of Byzantium followed by the page number respectively.
28
On the evolution of women’s social roles, see Angeliki Laiou, “The Role of Women in Byzantine Society,”
Jahrbuch Der Österreichischen Byzantinistik 31 (1981): 233. On the contemporary social construction of gender, see
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1999), 10–11; on gender and the development of various forms of
Christian asceticism, see Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994).
29
For a discussion on the potential application and limitation of “strategic essentialism” in a different yet religious
context, see Susan Abraham, “Strategic Essentialism in Nationalist Discourses: Sketching a Feminist Agenda in the
Study of Religion,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 1 (2009): 156-61.

Byzantine hagiographical accounts of holy women while perhaps obscuring women as “real
women,” also can be read in some instances to display a mode of unsaying the limits of gender
in order to manifest divine power in women’s religious lives. While several examples from
contemporary Orthodox leaders suggest a rhetoric marked by attempting to restrain women to
particular roles and functions, the Byzantine hagiographical examples I present portray wom-
en’s holiness as something that breaks out of and beyond expected gender limitations. These
examples negate the bounds of “gender” itself—and thus display a more comparatively open
posture to manifestations of holiness.30 Granted, historically, the opportunities for realizing
this open possibility that was hagiographically entertaining in Byzantium may have been lim-
ited, but nevertheless the religious ideal it constructed about women was, and still is, regarded
as “holy.” Thus, such a boundary-bending gender construction provides a relevant counterpoint
to contemporary considerations of how Orthodox balance their religious ideals with their com-
plex gendered realities.
Byzantine Gender Assumptions and Holiness

Some hagiographers speak of women being holy in spite of their gender, with the subtext pre-
sumed that women cannot attain the same spiritual feats men can. Occasionally, a hagiographer
will remark that gender does not relegate an individual to a lesser degree of virtue, or that in
Christ there is equality of the sexes, but then draws on tropes that rely on the audience’s contin-
ued assumption otherwise.31 For example, in the life of Eugenia the hagiographer claims that
Eugenia “surpassed everyone (a woman, I mean, surpassed the men; hence virtue is common to
all, and gender poses no hindrance to one wishing to achieve virtue).”32 By drawing attention to
the fact that the saint is holy in spite of being a woman, the hagiographer presumes the reader’s
assumption that women, due to their gender, could not achieve equal virtue, and negates it.
Similarly, the tenth century hagiography of Pelagia of Antioch, attributed to Symeon
Metaphrastes, explains,
30
On gender in Byzantium, see Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience, 800-1200, edited by Lynda Garland
(London: Farnham, 2006); Gender in the Early Medieval World, East and West 300-900, edited by Leslie Brubaker
and J.M.H Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Carolyn Connor, Women of Byzantium (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); also methodologically insightful is Damien Casey, Flesh Made Word
(Saarbrücken: Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010); Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, edited by Bronwen
Neil and Lynda Garland (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), and see also the rich listing of primary and secondary
sources on women, masculinity, and eunuchs available through “The Bibliography on Gender in Byzantium,”
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 2014, https://www.doaks.org/research/byzantine/resou rces/bibliography-on-gen-
der-in-byzantium#c1=&b_start =0.
31
For studies in Byzantine gender in relation to religious ideals, see Catia Galatariotou, “Holy Women and
Witches: Aspects of Byzantine Conceptions of Gender,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 9, no. 1 (1984): 55-94;
Liz James, Women, Men, and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium (London: Routledge, 1997); Robert Taft, “Women at
Church in Byzantium: Where, When and Why?,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998): 27-87; and with regard to emo-
tion as related to gender and religious ideals, see Andria Andreou, “‘Emotioning’ Gender: Plotting the Male and the
Female in Byzantine Greek Passions and Lives of Holy Couples”, in Emotions and Gender in Byzantine Culture, ed-
ited by S. Constantinou and M. Meyer (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 35-63. For additional ha-
giographically related discussions (albeit not limited to Byzantine sources), see Lynda Coon, Sacred Fictions: Holy
Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 71-94; Patricia
Cox Miller, “Is there a Harlot in this Text?: Hagiography and the Grotesque,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern
Studies 33, no. 3 (2003): 419-35; Sebastian Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey (eds.), Holy Women of the Syrian Orient
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987).
32
Christian Novels, 213. For a study on Symeon Metaphrastes, see Christian Høgel, Symeon Metaphrastes:
Rewriting and Canonization (Copenhagen: Museum of Tusculanum Press, 2002).

8 Ashley Purpura
Recounting the virtue of women, since it is in no way outclassed by that of men, is advan-
tageous and beneficial for all. And it is so much more advantageous, to the degree that this
virtue has been introduced so as to balance a comparable vice. In this way, the male gender
could be incited to surpass the female nature, women could strive not to be out-classed by
the virtue of their fellow women, and the evil habits of both, which are generally difficult
to expunge, could be erased.33
This author not only claims that the virtue of women is equal to men, but also that women saints
and modes of holiness are not merely beneficial for other women, thus making women’s holiness
authoritative for both women and men. This excerpt also draws on complementarity of the sexes, a
concept that through the narrative of Pelagia’s life is confounded, because she does not primarily
perform her holiness as a woman, but rather as the man Pelagios.34
Despite the assertion by various hagiographers that women have spiritual potential and that
hearing about their holiness is worthwhile, the historical and predominantly unquestioned con-
struct of women evident in the hagiography’s rhetoric reveals a perception of women as weaker
both in terms of physical constitution, and in terms of moral and spiritual progress. The hagi-
ographer for the life of Theodora, for example, explains that Theodora the nun spent the night
outside as a penance to her superior for moving her sleeping mat without permission and ex-
claims, “O, what a marvel! The angels were astonished to see such a terrible sight, a woman, the
soft and weakest vessel, thus spending the night in the open air, being assailed by constant
pelting of rain and frozen by the cold because of the order of the mother superior. What person
now or in the past has ever known a woman to show such obedience and to wrestle in such con-
tests?”35 The unsurprising inference is that women are less capable based on their female bodies
and “weaker” condition to endure physical adversity, but also that to “wrestle” with disobedi-
ence in such a holy way is something beyond expectations for a woman. In this hagiographical
conception, the opportunities for spiritual growth imaginable for women are sexually con-
strained, and yet the hagiographer indicates holiness in the very overcoming of the gender-based
limitations assumed for women. The description of Theodora in this way is not a mere patriar-
chal misperception about women’s capabilities, but also displays the belief that women are di-
vinely able to fulfill holiness in ways that are beyond what is prescribed for their gender.
Similarly, the hagiography of Ioustina describes her suffering specifically as unwomanly be-
cause, “Suffering in this way, she endured so bravely that she showed nothing ignoble nor what
one would expect of her female and weak gender; meanwhile, her tormentors ran out of energy
and stopped the torture.”36 The hagiographer takes the social expectation of his audience and
demonstrates how the divinely inspired woman overcomes them and renders these constructs
33
Christian Novels, 63; for discussion of the appeal of hagiography as “sexy stories,” see Alexander Kazhdan,
“Byzantine Hagiography and Sex in the Fifth to Twelfth Centuries,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 44 (1990): 131-43.
34
Christian Novels, 79; for related insights, see Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient
Hagiography (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 137-46.
35
Holy Women of Byzantium, 192. For discussion of the Life of Theodora of Thessalonike, see Stavroula
Constantinou, Female Corporeal Performances: Reading the Body in Byzantine Passions and Lives of Holy Women
(Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2005), 150-61; Michel Kaplan, “La vie de Théodora de Thessalonique, un écrit
familial,” Approaches to Byzantine Family, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Shaun Tougher (Burlington, VT: Ashgate
Variorum, 2013), 285-301; Évelyne Patlagean, “Theodora de Thessalonique: une sainte moniale et un culte citadin
(IX–XX siècle),” in Culto dei santi istituzioni e classi sociali in età preindustriale, edited by S. Gajano Boesch and L.
Sebastiani (Rome: Japadre, 1983), 37–67; Alice-Mary Talbot, “Family Cults in Byzantium: The Case of St. Theodora
of Thessalonike,” in ΛEIMΩN: Studies Presented to Lennart Rydén on his Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. J. O. Rosenqvist
(Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1996), 49-69.
36
Christian Novels, 43-5; On the association between martial motifs and manliness, see Michael Stewart, The
Soldier’s Life: Martial Virtues and Manly Romanitas in the Early Byzantine Empire (Leeds: Kismet Press, 2017).

void. The author takes Theodora’s holiness as the given, and then employs her gender in order
to communicate how she is holy and indicate via negation the ineffable content of that holiness.
Ioustina’s hagiographer highlights the endurance of the martyr as specifically a counter to the
reader’s expectations of her based on sex and gender. Such a rhetorical move contrasts with
what appears in the modern Orthodox world as an occasional impetus to sanctify specific gen-
der roles themselves instead of viewing the confounding of these gender roles as indicative of
holiness.37
Because the Byzantine hagiographers generally prioritize masculinity and manliness over
and sometimes against femininity and womanliness, women often not only have to overcome
their womanly nature, as in the case of Theodora, but also explicitly have to become manly to
display divine power. The trope of speaking of women’s holiness in manly terms demonstrates
the patriarchal nature of discourse such that the linguistic possibility of speaking of women’s
holiness in vocabulary not dominated by masculinity is almost untenable.38 Applying mascu-
line characteristics to the female saints serves to indicate rhetorically divine (rather than wom-
anly) power.39 There is a negation of the saint’s womanly identity and an affirmation of
masculinity that points beyond itself in its application to a female person, and subsequent un-
saying. Although these narrative constructions are limited by their historically patriarchal sup-
positions, they still reveal a construction of women as attaining holiness by performing gender
in unexpected and unbounded ways.
The trope of praising women through masculine attribution is certainly widespread in mar-
tyrdom accounts. In addition to the ways this trope is used rhetorically, it also suggests a more
gender-fluid rather than exclusive way of expressing holiness. Manliness and womanliness in-
dicate power status and ability, not always cisgender correspondence to one’s body. For exam-
ple, in the life of Eugenia/Eugenios, during a trial of torture, Eugenia and her companion “urged
the souls of the virgins who were with Eugenia toward manly courage.”40 The virgins are en-
couraged to be other than they are expected and socially instructed to be, and instead to don the
attributes of the gender aligned with the desirable qualities of bravery and fortitude. In the
moment of the virgins’ martyrdom and subsequent heavenly crowning, their divinizing poten-
tial is realized in performing the gender of men. While such gender instability is problematic by
suggesting that sanctification of women as women is a rhetorical impossibility for Byzantine
authors, it also counters any modern ecclesial tendencies that appear to reaffirm distinct gender
roles neatly according to sex. Additionally, the hagiographer indicates holiness via a type of
gender dissonance—he negates the saint’s feminine attributes, re-signifies the saint as a man,
and recalls her throughout as a holy woman.41 The negation of women in “womanly” terms
within such hagiographies serves to reveal divine power and inspire the reader. Thus, gender
37
See the relevant discussion on Byzantine constructions of the male ideal, gender, and sex in Damien Casey, “The
Spiritual Valency of Gender in Byzantine Society,” in Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society, edited by Bronwen
Neil and Lynda Garland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 172.
38
I draw insight on the androcentric nature of discourse from Luce Irigaray, “The Language of Man,” trans. Erin
Carlston, Cultural Critique 13 (1989): 191-202.
39
For modern discussion on the relation between gender and signifying power, see Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful
Category of Historical Analysis,” in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999),
42.
40
Christian Novels, 245.
41
On the problematic aspects of gender instability for women, see Harvey, “Chapter 3: Women in Byzantine
Hagiography.”

10 Ashley Purpura
appears in these hagiographical texts performed in various degrees and often dualities rather
than discrete and determined categories.
Beyond indicating physical courage in the face of violence, “manly” attributes also are ap-
plied to women in terms of excelling in virtue and asceticism even in ways that overshadow
“real” men—not just as a rhetorical adjective. About the married saint Thomais, for example,
the hagiographer writes, “And one could see in this situation (the case of Thomais) an unusual
married couple; for the wife was manly and masculine in virtue, and strove to surpass her own
nature [i.e., sex] by works of zeal done for virtue’s sake.”42 The explanation reveals that this is
atypical and as the hagiographer suggests, women were believed to be limited in their capacity
for virtue by their very “nature” (φύση).43 For example, earlier in the same hagiography the
narrator explains that Thomais “by nature was female, but by virtue and ascetic discipline much
more male than men.”44 With this explanation, not only does the hagiographer explain that
women are not confined to the limits of their “nature” in holiness—thus, negating their limita-
tions, and bringing together two seemingly mutually exclusive categories (superior virtue and
female)—but women also are not confined to expectations of subordination in pursuit of holi-
ness. Such a discursive narrative position perhaps suggests an upheaval of the Byzantine (and
modern) reader’s expectations of what and how holiness can be manifest in relation to gender.
Holiness by Performing a Different Gender Identity

In addition to portraying women’s holiness in manly terms, some hagiographers shift the pro-
tagonist’s gender more categorically and intentionally in order for the saint to pursue and mani-
fest holiness. The most prominent mode of holiness celebrated in several Byzantine hagiographies
and tradition that overtly crosses boundaries of gender presentation socially is that of female
saints who dress in male clothing and present themselves as men.45 There are multiple saints
celebrated in this category whose lives, while distinct, share a general narrative of concealment
of femininity through manly presentation to avoid unwanted circumstances (usually marriage,
abuse, or parental separation), excelling in a monastic setting even beyond their male peers,
discovery (often not until their death), and inspiring others to greater spirituality/working mira-
cles.46 The hagiographers celebrate these female saints for attaining holiness beyond their wom-
anly gender—and convey the saints’ holiness precisely by demonstrating that their holiness
42
Holy Women of Byzantium, 305.
43
For Orthodox patristic perspectives on the relations between person, “nature,” and gender, see Valerie Karras,
“Patristic Views on the Ontology of Gender,” in Personhood: Orthodox Christianity and the Connection between
Body, Mind, and Soul, ed. John Chirban (Westpoint, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1996), 113-19; John Behr, “A Note on the
‘Ontology of Gender,’” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42 (1998): 363-72; Verna Harrison, “Male and Female in
Cappadocian Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies 41 (1990): 441-71; Thomais’s Life as it appears in Holy
Women of Byzantium, is a translation of the Greek found in Acta Sanctorum Novembris, 4 (Brussels: Société des
Bollandistes, 1925), 234-42 [ed. Hippolyte Delehaye], 235.
44
45
On the cross-dressing hagiographical motif, see Crystal Lubinsky, Removing Masculine Layers to Reveal a
Holy Womanhood: The Female Transvestite Monks of Late Antique Eastern Christianity (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013);
John Anson, “The Female Transvestite in Early Monasticism: The Origin and Development of a Motif,” Viator 5
(1974): 1-32; Stavroula Constantinou, “Holy Actors and Actresses: Fools and Cross-Dressers as the Protagonists of
Saints’ Lives,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography: Volume II: Genre and Contexts, ed.
Stephanos Efthymiadis (Burlinton, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 343-62; Évelyne Patlagean, “L’histoire de la
femme déguise en moine et l’évolution de la sainteté féminen à Byzance,” Studi Medievali 17 (1976): 598-623; and
Judith Herrin, “In Search of Byzantine Women: Three Avenues of Approach,” in Images of Women in Antiquity, ed.
Avril Cameron (Detroit, MI: Croom Helm, 1983), 179. Herrin notes, “The monastic disguises adopted by women en-
abled them to simulate a holiness reserved by male ecclesiastical authorities to men only. To the church fathers, the
very idea of a holy woman was a contradiction in terms which women could only get round by pretending to be men.”
46
For the gendering of monasticism, see Alice-Mary Talbot, “A Comparison of the Monastic Experience of
Byzantine Men and Women,” in Greek Orthodox Theological Review 30 (1985): 1-20.

does not fit within the social constraints and religious assumptions associated with women.
After Pelagia of Antioch’s death, for example, the hagiographer explains, “When they (Pelagia’s
fellow monks) approached the body and extended their hands to anoint it with perfumed oil,
they saw a strange sight: a woman, who had been concealing her gender, and who like a man
had performed the deeds of men, and indeed obtained for her labors an even greater benefit than
men.”47 Similarly, Matrona of Perge’s hagiographer explains that, “holy Matrona, a woman
who, as we shall presently relate, displayed the traits of holy men in the midst of monastic men
and mastered the feats of accomplished solitaries.”48 Such descriptions explain that these saints
display manly traits, and they do not just wear the clothes of men. Such gender transitions lead-
ing to ultimate gender transcendence implies that adoption of the male gender has to do with
spiritual achievement and superiority rather than mere social presentation.
Some hagiographers do not do much to ameliorate a tension that a reader might perceive
between an expectation of women performing holiness through manliness and maintaining a
clerical and gender hierarchy. Eugenia’s life, however, provides an example of a hierarch within
the text justifying and accepting Eugenia’s presentation as Eugenios. Specifically, a divine vi-
sion outs that Eugenia has transformed herself into Eugenios to the Bishop Helenos. Helenos
remarks to the saint
O Eugenia, with good reason you have changed your name to Eugenios, so that your name
matches your spirit, since you have a manly soul and show great manliness in all respects.
May you defeat your nature even more with your will; and may you prevail in Christ, for
whom, also now, while a woman, you pretend to be a man and, because of your intense
desire for Him, you changed both your dress and your name. And I am saying these things,
neither to disgrace your female gender, nor wishing to make a spectacle of your affairs, but
so that you may learn God’s great concern for you and how He did not conceal anything
about you from me.49
Helenos permits Eugenia’s transformation even though it crosses gendered categories, because her
actions and her spirit manifest a manliness. It is a rectification of names, in a Byzantine key.
Although this is associated with particular superior attributes, the hagiographer defends Eugenia’s
change of gender identity because it reflects who the saint really is in terms of spiritual identity and
actions, and because this change of gender presentation is due to the saint’s “intense desire” for God
(opposed to some more worldly or sinful motive). The metaphrastic narrator endorses Eugenia’s
transition into Eugenios by adding that “the bishop allowed Eugenia to remain in men’s clothes,
something that no one knew, neither from before, nor indeed after the bishop’s speech.”50 Here, not
only is it that the female saint’s initial deceit results in a good end to be teleologically justified, but
that the saint’s behavior is allowed and even endorsed hierarchically. The abbots and bishops who
become aware of the female monks do not reject the ways these women have for themselves discov-
ered spiritual lives, but rather continue, albeit with some adaptation at times, to support the women
in their spiritual journeys—even as holy men. The Byzantine patriarchal authorities in the narra-
tive of Eugenia’s life, for example, support her in performing manliness rather than rebuking her to
47
48
Holy Women of Byzantium, 18. On Matrona’s life more generally, see Eva Topping, “St. Matrona and Her
Friends: Sisterhood in Byzantium,” in ΚΑΘΗΓΗΤΡΙΑ: Essays Presented to Joan Hussey on Her 80th Birthday, ed. J.
Chrysostomides (Camberley: Porphyrogenitus, 1988) and Khalifa Abubakr Bennasser, Gender and Sanctity in Early
Byzantine Monasticism: A Study of the Phenomenon of Female Ascetics in Male Monastic Habit with a Translation of
the Life of St. Matrona, Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1984.
49
50
Ibid., 207.

12 Ashley Purpura
stay in a gender specific role. They do not even prohibit her from portraying herself as a man to
assume vocational opportunities otherwise closed to her. Instead, it is almost as if Eugenia must be
a man in the Byzantine author’s description due to her degree of virtue—she performs holiness in
a man’s place and is praised for it by her hierarch, as appropriately fulfilling her true vocation.
Eugenia, as a woman, perfects her holiness as a man—and yet not quite (for the audience always
knows she is actually female). Such a denial of the saint’s holiness being accurately described by
one gender or the other, and instead employing a proliferation of seemingly contradictory signifi-
ers, suggests a mode of holiness that presses intentionally beyond the reader’s normative
conceptions.
With the life of another popular cross-dressing or andromimetic saint, we see that not only
does the hagiographer describe the saint in manly terms, and the saint assumes the appearance
of a man, but the saint even speaks of herself interiorly as a man as well.51 Mary/Marinos,
whose hagiography develops in the fifth through ninth centuries, exemplifies this trait after
adopting a male monastic life. In her hagiography, Mary follows her father to a men’s monas-
tery, has her gender changed by her father (another textual patriarchal approval of the woman’s
actions) and by so doing negates the reader’s expectation of a young woman leaving her father’s
house for marriage.52 Upon her entry to a male monastery, Marinos’s father says to her, “Child,
take heed how you conduct yourself, for you are about to enter into the midst of fire, for a
woman in no way enters a [male] monastery.” Marinos’s father states a fact: women may not
enroll in a male monastery, so to follow her father Mary must become a man. Marinos, we are
told, “passes” sufficiently, as some of the monks “considered her to be a eunuch, for she was
beardless and of delicate voice. Others considered that [this condition] was instead the result of
her great asceticism, for she partook of food only every second day.”53 In time, however,
Marinos is accused of rape and assumes the blame for impregnating an innkeeper’s daughter,
so that this saintly virgin voluntarily takes on sexual shame. Marinos then exiles himself to the
elements outside the monastery and says, “I have sinned as a man,” while he raises the child he
is accused of fathering. Marinos adopts the male identity as a technique of asceticism, but to
others he uses it to present himself further as sinful. To the reader, therefore, Mary/Marinos’s
holiness is manifest via this voluntary adoption of the consequences of a sin impossible for
Mary to commit. Marinos inverts the reader’s expectations of motherhood by performing his
role as parent as a monk-father, specifically as a single (opposed to married) ascetic man in
contrast to the expectations of married women with children as worldly and noisy.54 The hagi-
ographer explains Marinos’s paternal role in similarly ascetic terms, saying, “Thus, in addition
to the [usual] trials and temptations that beset a monk, Marinos was continually anxious about
procuring and providing sustenance for the child.”55 Marinos thus not only performs manliness,
but also fatherhood, as a form of asceticism. Marinos adopts a multifaceted identity that is not
gender normative for either male or female sex as a mode of sanctity. The performance of sanc-
tity, in this case, is unconstrained by gendered expectations and yet communicated through
their simultaneous assertion and negation.
51
Cf. Late Antique shifting ideals of masculinity via Christianity in Mathew Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch:
Masculinity, Gender Ambiguity, and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
2001).
52
On the lives and experiences of “ordinary” Byzantine women, see Ioli Kalavrezou, Byzantine Women and Their
World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
53
Holy Women of Byzantium, 7-8. For more on this point specifically and women in monastic space more gener-
ally, see Alice-Mary Talbot, “Women’s Space in Byzantine Monasteries,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998):
113-27.
54
55
Ibid., 10.

Although Mary/Marinos, and Eugenia/Eugenios are in various ways rendered as pious ex-
ceptions to cisgender norms in secretly donning male monastic clothes to escape unwanted
circumstances and quietly pursue spiritual lives, Matrona of Perge presents an example of more
open and condoned female performance of male monasticism. After Matrona is discovered by
her male superior to be a woman, she is required to separate herself from her male monastic
community. However, both she and the women who come to join her female community daily
wear the male monastic habit, and receive a blessing from Matrona’s former abbot to do so.56
The narrator mentions that this tradition continues at Matrona’s monastery even after her death,
noting, “Through the benevolence and love of mankind of our Lord Jesus Christ this same order
has been followed unto the present day in her monastery, preserved by those who have suc-
ceeded her.” Such an observation suggests that the overt performance of masculinity as a form
of ascetic discipline for women was not an individual-based aberration, but rather was a mode
by which holiness could be pursued through an unsaying (and an un-performing, if you will) of
the socially conceived gendered self.57
In addition to her male monastic attire, Matrona’s life includes several other aspects that are
particularly confounding of social and religious gender expectations. Before undertaking mo-
nasticism, Matrona was a mother and she voluntarily gave her child to the care of another; she
“put off [her] female attire forthwith and cut [her] hair; in a word, becoming a man both in garb
and purpose” in order to enter a men’s monastery.58 Matrona rejects the “natural” feminine
maternal role she has, and flees her husband to pursue a monastic and masculine asceticism.
Lest the Byzantine reader be outraged at a mother leaving behind her child and lawful spouse,
the hagiographer states that it was a divine vision that led her to these actions. The reader might
understand that Matrona’s abandonment of her roles as wife and mother was part of her divine
vocation.59 The hagiographer explains Matrona’s wishes to leave her husband: “this being the
result of her great longing for the Lord and rejection of the delights of this world . . . the blessed
Matrona uttered something in the vein of Abraham and quite beyond nature itself: ‘Let there be
nothing in common between me and my affections,’ said she. ‘Let the honest Susannah take my
child, and let the monastic life sustain me.’” Matrona then abandons her child to the care of a
widow to pursue the monastic life and the hagiographer explains this action was due to Matrona’s
“longing for the Lord.”60 While this example stresses the particularity of Matrona and her cir-
cumstances (and does not encourage all mothers and wives to abandon their callings in these
domains), it does suggest that in the Byzantine Orthodox conception God could call a woman
away from these feminine roles to pursue holiness by performing masculinity in the spaces and
places otherwise excluding her.61 Once Matrona is enrolled among the monks, the hagiographer
explains, “she was now completely transformed into a man and bore a man’s name, Babylas.”62
As in the previous case of Mary/Marinos, for Matrona it is not just a putting on of clothes and
cutting hair to manifest a compelling disguise, but a complete transformation and undoing of
56
Ibid., 45, 63-64.
57
Ibid., 64.
58
Ibid., 27.
59
Cf. Stavroula Constantinou, “Family in the Byzantine Greek Legend, Saint Alexios, the Man of God,” in
Approaches to the Byzantine Family, edited by Leslie Brubaker and Shaun Tougher (New York: Routledge, 2016),
273-75.
60
61
See also the discussion of female transgression as a means of divine revelation in Susan Ashbrook Harvey,
“Holy Impudence, Sacred Desire: The Women of Matthew 1:1-16 in Syriac Tradition,” in Studies on Patristic Texts
and Archaeology: If These Stones Could Speak —Essays in Honor of Dennis Edward Groh, edited by George
Kalantzis and Thomas Martin (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009).
62

14 Ashley Purpura
identity from woman, wife, and mother, to that of a manly monastic—in order to express tran-
scendent divine likeness.
In addition to her initial flight and disguise to enter the monastic life, the hagiographer ad-
dresses two other ways in which Matrona might have incurred spiritual harm in her presenta-
tion as Babylas. First, in a scene where Matrona’s abbot learns that she is a woman, he raises
concerns about Matrona taking communion with her head uncovered, and the offering of the
kiss of peace to the male monks. Matrona explains that she successfully negotiates living be-
yond her gendered boundaries as a man, all the while respecting the restraints placed upon her
embodied female reality in sacred spaces, because, she says, “during the divine mysteries I have
pulled my cloak halfway over my head, feigning a headache. And as for the symbol of peace and
seal of love, I have not shunned it, for I considered that I offered myself not unto human mouths,
but unto God’s angels and men free of passion.”63 The spiritual-logistical concerns voiced by the
abbot could be read as objections the reader might raise to a woman secretly dwelling in a male
monastery—that she brings about (either for herself or others) lust and that she violates ritual
propriety before God. Matrona recalls her lowliness before God—that is, her own femaleness—
and covers her head, but not in a way that recognizably departs from her manly performance of
Bablyas. It appears she expresses to God, in this ritual context, a simultaneous self-expression
of female piety and a negation of it, in order to present herself open to divine reception. Beyond
these two concerns, the author makes no further distinctions between Matrona with regard to
certain behaviors or ranks distinct from her male counterparts. Matrona is a woman who re-
ceives the kisses of many men, not as men’s passionate kisses but as the embrace of “God’s
angels.” In order to reconfigure her own gender and its circumstances in a male monastery, not
only does she daily re-identify her own gender in male monastic terms, but also reimagines the
identities of those around her in more ideal ways. Rather than using her gender performance to
deceive toward sin, she navigates its challenges in ways that uplift and are spiritually beneficial.
Matrona’s hagiography models an approach to gender that renders its interpretation contingent
on understandings of holiness, rather than determinative of them.
Examples from the hagiographies of Pelagia/Pelagios, Matrona/Babylas, Eugenia/Eugenios,
and Mary/Marinos display instances where women transform themselves for prolonged periods
of time (some almost a whole lifetime, others more intermittently) to live out their holiness in
ways that confound the expectations and socially accepted roles envisioned for their womanly
gender. Despite the ways these saints and those who write about them “transition” into male-
ness, the Orthodox church and hagiographers persist in commemorating them as women. In
some instances these commemorations still rely on conveying how the saints fulfilled expected
cisgender feminine attributes in their holy lives.64 While some could read this as a patriarchal
overstepping of these women’s autonomously claimed transgressive identities, one could also
view it as a way of expanding or perhaps even abolishing the limits of what “women,” at least
religiously, categorically signifies.65 Despite the ways in which Byzantine Christian literature
overtly employed masculine attributes to signify women’s holiness, Orthodox Christian liturgi-
cal texts and iconography still commemorate these saints as women. Matrona’s hagiographer,
for example, lauds the saint after her death as a “loving mother,” despite Matrona’s
abandonment of her own physical child and her subsequent life of donning male attire and a
63
Ibid., 26. For some discussion on women entering a male monastery and parallels to this scene in particular, see
Alexander Kazhdan, “Women at Home,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52 (1998): 1-17; at 15.
64
See for example the commemoration of Mary of Egypt, Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware
(South Canaan, PA: St. Tikhon’s Seminary Press, 2002), 456-57.
65
Casey, “The Spiritual Valency of Gender,” 172.

masculine identity.66 Similarly, Thomais’s hagiography praises her “proper glow of modesty”
alongside descriptions of her as “she who carried a manly soul in a female body.”67 Even as
“creatures of the margins,” transvestite nuns’ lives are not irrelevant exceptions to be disre-
garded. By intentionally entering the margins and celebrating spiritual identities that intersect
discrete gender categories, these saints’ lives have the potential to significantly inform Orthodox
understandings of the ways gender can function through a type of apophatic dynamic to com-
municate holiness.68
Performing Cisgender Differently as Holiness

In addition to women who perform their sanctity through living masculine ascetic lives, the
Byzantine hagiographical tradition also prominently presents the subversion and confounding
of expected gender roles, abilities, and behaviors as evidence of holiness. For example, there is
the hagiographical development of the category of the holy house-wife that develops primarily
in the ninth and tenth centuries. This category of women’s saintliness also displays an openness
to the ways in which female holiness might be recognized and celebrated in “nontraditional”
ways—an unsaying of the gender expectations of being a wife, as it were. Although these saints
fulfill very normative gender roles by being wives, what is surprising is that their ordinariness
is yoked with saintliness.69 The hagiographer of Mary the Younger explains,
Although she was a woman, although she was married and bore children, nothing hindered
her in any way from finding favor with God: neither the weakness of [female] nature, nor
the annoyances of wedlock, nor the needs and cares of child-rearing. To the contrary, it was
these things which gave her the occasion to find favor [with God], and thus proved that
those who believe and claim that such things form an obstacle to virtue are foolish and
create pretexts for sins.70
The fact that married child-bearing (and therefore sexually active) women could be regarded as
saintly displays an openness to female modes of holiness that (even if purposed in order to school
monastic men with humility) display women as holy through experiences relatable to many wom-
en’s everyday lives. In these stories, physical spousal violence toward women is portrayed as a
wrong via its portrayal as a means of martyric suffering, and women are praised for philanthropy
even if in lieu of domestic duties. These characteristics suggest that violent male dominance over a
wife is condemned, and a women’s subversion of their husband’s authority in pursuit of virtue is
66
67
Ibid., 257; on this literary invocation of “modesty” compare with Kate Wilkinson, Women and Modesty in Late
Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
68
69
See for example the comment in Holy Women of Byzantium, 214; Kazhdan, “Women at Home.”
70

16 Ashley Purpura
praised.71 Thomais, for example, is violently abused by her husband, but the narrator explains that
“She adorned herself with wounds as with pearls, with hurts as with most precious stones; she was
embellished by thrashings as with golden [coins], and henceforth presented herself as a queen
clothed and arrayed in divers colors before the Ruler of all. She was adorned by insults as with
expensive earrings, her beauty was enhanced by the beatings, [and] she was cheered by the mock-
eries.”72 Even though Thomais and Mary the Younger function in the traditional cisgender category
of wife, in order to show holiness, these saints break beyond and redefine the feminine perfor-
mance of this role. Although these hagiographies do not demonstrate the possibility of a holy
woman in a healthy sexually active marriage, they do celebrate the female subversion of restrictive
male structures and the overcoming of adversity to display holiness.
In addition to women functioning hagiographically to surprise the reader with holiness in the
male monastic and domestic spheres, many stories also include women’s own bodies as the sites
of holiness in surprising ways. Many Byzantine Christian texts assume women are the source
of lust and their bodies the loci of enticement for men. Playing off this expectation, some hagi-
ographers depict exposed sainted female bodies as the source of inciting holiness among the
viewer. One could say that even after their deaths, female saints are divinely aided in overcom-
ing patriarchal expectations of the ways in which their holiness is expressed. Instead of moving
those who view her body to lust, Marinos’s dead naked body is a source of spiritual wonder and
moves monks and an accusatory innkeeper (who thought Mary/Marinos had impregnated his
daughter) to prayer and penitence. The hagiographer explains that after her death “the superior
took the innkeeper and showed him that [Marinos] was a woman. At this [the innkeeper] began
to lament and to marvel at what had happened.” The monks “discovered that he was a woman,
and shrieking, they all began to cry out in a single voice, ‘Lord, have mercy.’” The abbot “seeing
[for himself]. . . cast himself down at her feet, and with many tears cried out, ‘forgive. . .’”73 Not
only does the body no longer incite passion, it quite the opposite incites spiritual transforma-
tion. Therefore, one could not generalize that the female body is problematic, shameful, or in
need of covering to protect men and society from disorder and lust; rather in these instances the
exposed female body moves its male viewers to greater piety. A similar scene appears in the
famous hagiography of Mary of Egypt, traditionally attributed to Sophronios of Jerusalem
(sixth-seventh centuries). The hieromonk Zosimas sees Mary as “a naked figure whose body
was black, as if tanned by the scorching of the sun. It had on its head hair white as wool, and
even this was sparse as it did not reach below the neck of its body.” When he sees this, he is not
led to passionate fascination, but rather by Mary’s ascetic transformation “he was inspired with
pleasure and, filled with joy at that incredible sight.”74 It is not just the sight of an emaciated
ascetic body that moves the viewer to awe, but specifically the female ascetic body, which ap-
pears as a type of wondrous paradox in its negation of mutually exclusive categories.
71
For further discussion of Byzantine marriage and “holy housewives,” see Anthony Kalldelis and Charis Messis,
“‘Conjugal Violence and the Ideological Construction of Byzantine Marriage,” Limes Plus: Journal of Social Sciences
and Humanities 2 (2016): 21-40. See also the brief discussion of Thomais and the association between marital suffer-
ing and martyrdom in Nathalie Delierneux, “The Literary Portrait of Byzantine Female Saints,” in The Ashgate
Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography: Volume II: Genre and Contexts, ed. Stephanos Efthymiadis
(Burlinton, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 372-75; Judith Herrin, Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in
Byzantiuim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 120. Although Herrin observes, “While many female
Byzantine saints displayed a dedication to the relief of poverty and illness, the contrast between their activity and the
great variety of fields open to their male equivalents reveals what very limited possibilities existed for women,” I
suggest these female saints’ lives still negate the limitations of the category of gender for holiness even amid their
limited opportunities for women’s activities by showing the women as righteously insubordinate to their husbands.
72
73
Ibid., 11.
74
Ibid., 74; for related discussion, see Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints, 147-54.

In contrast to the involuntary revealing of Mary of Egypt and Mary/Marinos’s naked bodies,
Eugenia/Eugenios voluntarily strips off her tunic in front of her father and brothers to reveal
herself after a noble woman and the woman’s servants accuse Eugenia/Eugenios of sexual as-
sault. Although this instance of self-defense amid scandal is not a typical hagiographical trope,
Eugenia/Eugenios explains, “It is time to speak the truth boldly, so that her [the noble woman’s]
lies may no longer exult over the truth and so that the Christian faith may not be misrepresented
by the Greeks.”75 When Eugenia does take it upon herself to reveal her female body, in the midst
of accusation, the author explains that she does this, and her cross-dressing overall, on behalf of
the faith. With Eugenia/Eugenios, a naked woman brings to light brewing dishonesty. The ha-
giographical use of the surprising faith-inducing female body and pious yet spousally subver-
sive house-wife suggests a more a teleological approach to justifying gender performance rather
than a deontological determination of particular ways of being “woman,” to which one must
conform as Orthodox. Thus, at least some aspects of the Orthodox hagiographical tradition at-
test that the body, what it signifies, and how it relates to gender-based social expectations, can
be dynamically constructed in the service of orthodoxy. Gender appears to serve as a flexible
and temporally dependent medium of communicating holiness, rather than an essentialized
category aligned with prescriptive behaviors based on the body one might have.
Women’s Authority and Holiness

In addition to women overtly assuming “manliness” and fulfilling their expected “womanli-
ness” in surprising ways, some female saints invert expectations of gender-based subordination,
and attain positions of authority and autonomy in pursuing spiritual goals. More specifically,
the ways that saints in the previous sections are remarked upon as being “manly” or overcoming
a womanly “nature” suggests that holiness and therefore manliness is yoked to and primarily
indicative of positions of power. By being holy, hagiographers depict women in masculine terms
to demonstrate a position of power by their holiness that is unimaginable, and in many ways
incompatible with the Byzantine conception of womanhood.76 Individuals with female bodies,
however, are not necessarily relegated to subordination to the men in ostensible ecclesial and
personal positions of authority in relation to them. The contemporary conception of women in
various Orthodox cultures has shifted in diverse ways from its manifestations during the
Byzantine Empire, but some instances of hierarchically endorsed discourse appeals to tradition
as if gender is a stable concept.77 With the examples in the following section, we find that not
only are conceptions of holy women varied, but they often invert the expectations of womanly
subordination to men, that is in other sources suggested as virtuous for male and female saints.
Voluntary subordination is in Christological imitation a sign of holiness, but with these exam-
ples, we have female saints whose insubordination to the “natural” or expected order of authori-
ties is employed as a marker of holiness. Such depictions display that the Byzantine assumed
weakness and natural subordination of women to men in various situations can be overcome by
divine power, rendering the human and socially constructed order righteously subverted and
“unsaid.”
75
76
For the connections between gender and power signification more broadly, see Scott, “Gender: A Useful
Category of Historical Analysis,” 42, and in a Byzantine context specifically, Casey, “The Spiritual Valency of
Gender.”
77
See n.3-5 above.

18 Ashley Purpura
Kassia (ninth century), for example, famously theologically rebuffed the emperor Theophilos
during the bride show organized by his mother.78 Given that Theophilos was an iconoclast em-
peror, such a rebuke could be read as a very gendered insult to the emperor (as if to say,
Theophilos was upbraided by a woman!), but Kassia’s legacy suggests that she was an impres-
sive poetic theologian in her own right. Nevertheless, the narrative celebrates (at that time) a
laywoman correcting the gendered taunt of an emperor with a theological claim. Obviously,
Kassia was not selected as the emperor’s bride, and instead founded a monastery and wrote
poetry and hymns that persist even in present usage (with endorsement from the highly influ-
ential and iconophile Studite Monastery). Kassia exercises surprising authority over the em-
peror and is praised in holiness for censuring the cleverness of this man, rejecting marriage, and
fulfilling a role dominated by men, as a hymnographer.79 Kassia and her legacy do not subordi-
nate themselves unquestionably to some sort of gender hierarchy, nor does she conform to a
type of quiet monasticism. Instead, Kassia is a celebrated example of a pious woman employing
authority and leaving a legacy of developing a voice for prominent ecclesial participation and
perspective.
In addition to Kassia, there are other examples in which hagiographers depict female saints
as having righteous zeal that leads them to disobedience or insubordination against male hier-
archs, who—unlike the impious emperor—are not in need of rhetorical schooling to validate
the faith and expression of the readers. Pelagia of Antioch, for one, threatens the bishop to bap-
tize her immediately, and after struggling physically with the bishop, refusing to let go of his
feet, the narrator explains that “before her spiritual baptism, there was another purification, the
more arduous baptism of tears.”80 The narrator continues that just a short time after her swift
baptism, she went to live “in the holy Land hidden and unknown for three years” but without
asking a blessing from the bishop to do so as other saints had done.81 Pelagia demonstrates an
assertiveness in overriding the bishop’s preference for a more lengthy catechism, takes upon
herself baptism by tears, and adopts an ascetic life without any blessing or direction from a se-
nior male cleric. All of this demonstrates her failure to be submissive and obedient in a way that
the hagiographer uses to convey her holiness—specifically her passionate zeal to please her
heavenly “bridegroom.”82 In identifying her true bridegroom and source of authority in a divine
reality, she is able to successfully reject and exercise authority over the male clerics who would
otherwise have authority over her.
Women’s hagiographies abound with explanations and statements of instances of their insub-
ordination to expected familial and religious authorities. In being a Christian, Eugenia disobeys
her father and “casts [a] defiant eye towards [her] parents,” and Matrona flees her husband on
multiple occasions in favor of the ascetic life.83 The hagiographies of both of these women argu-
78
Multiple Byzantine authors recount this scene where Theophilos says to Kassia “Through a woman [came forth]
the baser [things]” and Kassia replies, “And through a woman [came forth] the better [things].” See Leo Grammaticus
(Bonn edition, 1842), 213-14=Theodosius Melitenus (T. Tafel edition, 1859), 147= Georgius Monachus (Bonn edition,
1838), 789-90, Ps.-Symeon, 624-25.
79
Diane Touliatos-Banker, “Women Composers of Medieval Byzantine Chant,” College Music Symposium 24, no.
1 (1984): 62-80; Kurt Sherry, Kassia the Nun in Context (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2013); Anna M. Silvas,
“Kassia the Nun,” in Byzantine Women: Varieties of Experience 800-1200, edited by Lynda Garland (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2006). Ashbrook Harvey, “Women’s Voices Bearing Witness,” 18; Marc Lauxtermann, “Three Biographical
Notes,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 91 (1998): 391-97; Eva Catafygiotu Topping, “The Psalmist, St. Luke and Kassia the
Nun,” Byzantine Studies 9 (1982): 199-219; and Kassia: The Legend, the Woman, and Her Work, edited by Antonía
Tripolitis (New York: Garland Publishing, 1992).
80
Christian Novels, 73, 75-79.
81
Ibid., 79.
82
Ibid., 75.
83
Ibid., 196, 189; Holy Women of Byzantium, 50.

ably celebrate their overcoming of the opposition of established male authorities in pursuit of
holiness. It is not just the female saints themselves who are rendered authoritative by their zeal.
Such righteously unbounded behavior can be said to extend to other, perhaps less saintly, women
in the hagiographies as well. For example, in the life of Theodora, a woman with an ill daughter
asks a priest for part of the saint’s miraculous oil that was on a piece of parchment. The priest
refuses.
She (the mother) cried out these words with lamentation and wailing; but the cleric, who
wanted to bring the oil to the members of his household, refused to give it to her. And so
that admirable woman grabbed the piece of papyrus with her fingertips and was able to
squeeze oil out of it; and immediately anointing the half-paralyzed child in a certain place
with the oil squeezed out on her fingers, she regained a whole and healthy daughter through
the intercessions of the saint.84
The hagiography lauds a woman for disobeying a selfish priest and being the minister of healing
“through the intercessions of the saint” to her own daughter, instead of following the established
and ostensible hierarchical order. These examples display the right to be insubordinate in the face
of unrighteous opposition, instead of a categorical blind submission to social-ecclesial and gen-
der-based hierarchies.
Not only do some female saints display insubordination to expected temporal familial, im-
perial, and even hierarchical authorities, some hagiographers rhetorically negotiate the female
saint into superior degrees of authority over men, thus inverting the expected alignment be-
tween the ecclesial and gender hierarchies. Such is the case with Eugenia/Eugenios, who enters
a men’s monastery to avoid marriage, and eventually the monks elect her abbot. Metaphrastes
relates that at this promotion
She (Eugenios) was overwhelmed by fear and perplexity; for she did not consider it right
that as a woman she should rule over men, but she thought it would be obstinate and dis-
obedient to disregard the common will of the brotherhood. Therefore, she decided to learn
from the Gospel what should be done, entrusting the problem to God. When the book was
opened at random, these words of the Lord marvelously resounded, “if anyone among you
wants to be first, let him be last of all, and the servant of all.” On account of these words,
she assumed the abbacy against her will, but also assumed a position of servitude fully and
so willingly (which of the humble duties spurned by even the lesser brethren did she not
perform?)85
Clearly, the author feels the need to explain how Eugenia’s abbacy preserves virtuous feminine
humility, and yet fittingly leads a men’s monastery. The hagiographer negates the hierarchical
gender order by making Eugenia the head of the monastery. The author does this successfully amid
patriarchal concerns, however, by negating Eugenia’s gender categorization. The monastic brethren
elect Eugenios abbot because she appears to be a holy man, but in considering the position, Eugenia
reflects on how she might accept it as a woman. Such tensions are not fully resolved in a way that
relegates Eugenios back to the norms for Eugenia; rather Eugenia, through her redefinition of the
abbacy in terms of service and obedience to the will of others, accepts an undoubtedly authoritative
position over the brethren.
84
85
Christian Novels, 213-15.

20 Ashley Purpura
One finds a similar negotiation of a woman assuming the authority of a man’s position in the
life of Mary of Egypt. The priest-monk Zosimas meets the formerly profligate and presently
desert dwelling ascetic Mary and asks her to offer a blessing. Mary, like Eugenia, acknowledges
the usual gender order, and then by invoking voluntary submission to another as the rationale
for assuming the higher position, offers the prayer.86 The hagiographical trope of the most de-
sirable and worthy leader being the one who appears for the sake of humility not to want the role
of leadership is amplified with regard to women. Women already are expected to be submissive
and humble by virtue of their gender, so that taking on authority over men is made reasonable
to the reader when couched in terms of service and obedience, and as evidence of ungendered
holiness. In the desert, Zosimas mistakes Mary for a man, she plays the role of a “spiritual fa-
ther,” and offers a blessing over him, a priest. Indeed, the hagiography transforms the formerly
profligate woman in the text into an angelic state where she can teach even a priestly man as a
form of obedience to his request.87 Mary of Egypt’s holiness is rendered legible by reference to
gendered ideals and categories, but her holiness is depicted as not limited to any one of them.
Unlike other perhaps more marginal saints, Mary’s life continues to feature prominently in
Orthodox worship. A whole week is dedicated to her in Lent, her life is read liturgically, and
hymnographically she serves as a model of penitence for all Orthodox.88 Mary’s hagiography
and its subsequent liturgical incorporation show a negotiation of the expected gender hierarchy
to make her holiness legible, but such denial of gendered bounds also clearly portrays Mary of
Egypt as above and not confined to traditional gender roles. In this example, and the others
mentioned, there is a clear distinction between the expected social norms and more expansive
and unbounded spiritual ideals, and it is by negation, inversion, and unlikely pairing of attri-
butes that spiritual ideals are conveyed.
Byzantine Hagiographical Insights for Contemporary Gender Discourse

Prominent contemporary Orthodox hierarchical discourse about gender, and women in particu-
lar, frequently displays concerns for maintaining structures such as priesthood and family, and
the performance of gender in “traditional” ways.89 From this type of public rhetoric, it may ap-
pear in some cases that women’s religious lives and opportunities for holiness are prescribed
patriarchally to essentialized roles and limited cisgender modes of fulfilling them—even if
women nevertheless find more diverse ways of expressing and constituting their own religious
identities.90 In general, Orthodoxy has such a strong sense of the authority of hierarchy and
tradition that examples of hierarchical endorsement of women to stay in particular “roles” could
make it appear as if Orthodox religious ideals have always supported such rather bounded (and
cataphatic!) understandings of gender. Byzantine hagiography, as one significant genre of
86
87
Ibid., 65-94; See the related discussion about “holy harlots” in Burrus, Sex Lives of Saints, 161. Burrus aptly
notes, “the holy woman is viewed from the perspective of a male ascetic who figures prominently in her Life and
whose own ascetic journey is closely linked with her own. Here too traditionally asymmetrical relations of power—in
this case, explicitly marked by gender—are invoked only to be repeatedly reversed and displaced, so that gender itself
is rendered complex, unstable, and fluid.”
88
Lenten Triodion, 456-57.
89
For another example of such gender-limiting discourse, see Patriarch Kyrill’s comments as quoted and trans-
lated in “Russian Orthodox Patriarch denounces ‘dangerous feminism’,” Agence France-Presse in Moscow, edited
and reprinted by Sarah Titterton in The Telegraph, 10 April 2013, https://www.teleg raph.co.uk/women/9984591/Russi
an-Orthodox-Patriarch-denou nces-dangerous-feminism.html.
90
See the discussion of women and patriarchy in Nadieszda Kizenko, “Paradoxes of Patriarchy: Orthodoxy and
Gender in Post-Soviet Russia,” in Orthodox Paradoxes: Heterogeneities and Complexities in Contemporary Russian
Orthodoxy, edited by Katya Tolstaya (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 302-17.

Orthodox tradition, however, includes celebrated examples of Orthodox women whose holiness
is communicated through their authors’ use of masculine and feminine social expectations, and
the diverse ways in which holiness allows a transgressing of the limits imposed by such expec-
tations. Through the very negation of the possibility of a holy woman, these texts reject a singu-
lar and generalized way of being holy, and instead acknowledge in dynamic portrayals that God
is present, powerful, transformative, and liberating in women’s lives. Women as religious sub-
jects constituted and known as diversely holy through the Byzantine patriarch-centric, apophat-
ically-styled affirmation of celebrated saintly women (at least in relation to their female/
womanly nature) identifies women’s holiness and lives in Christ as “not one,” and as such evi-
dencing divine power to transgress social boundaries and gendered expectations. Although
these constructions rely on androcentric presumptions and fascinations, they also leave open a
way of thinking of Orthodox women in “tradition” that has a resourceful negative space with
the potential to disrupt any contemporary prescriptive narratives of Orthodox women’s “tradi-
tional gender roles.”
Even though Byzantine hagiography has very little that suggests that a regular, ordinary,
feminine woman without violence or a major life and identity shift could be holy, through a type
of inadvertent apophasis, the Byzantine negation of a holy woman as woman reveals a broad tra-
dition of women’s holiness manifesting in divinely iconic ways. The participation of Byzantine
holy women in manliness and their confounding of the limitations implied by their womanhood
is not only a way of conceiving gender that reflects a patriarchal perspective, but also suggests
a “not oneness” of female holiness that is discursively negotiated by imagining women as that
which is more easily named (the man). Yet, the historical and present-day Orthodox commem-
orations never forget that these women (Eugenia, Pelagia, Matrona, etc.) remain women, even
while transformatively performing “manliness,” resulting in an un-saying of their gender to
express holiness in authoritative, gender-insubordinate, and hierarchically challenging ways.
These rhetorical gender-based “dissimilar similarities” present in the Orthodox hagiographical
tradition provide a “traditional” resource for rethinking Orthodox theological and pastoral un-
derstandings of gender’s relation to perceptions and diverse possibilities of holiness. While the
Byzantine examples I present are far from a pure liberating and theologically untroubled egal-
itarian yet traditional past, they do reflect enduring centuries of celebrating women’s holiness
that do not stay submissively subordinate to social assumptions of gender. The hagiographical
un-saying of women’s holiness, and related unknowing of the holiness as gender-bound, present
an aspect of historical Orthodox “tradition” in which women’s vocational options, behaviors,
authority, and self-expression are admitted through an apophatic-like discursive dynamic that
renders the possibility for diverse expressions of women’s holiness as a divine reality.

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Modern Theology Month 2019 DOI:10.1111/moth.

INNOVATING “TRADITIONAL” WOMEN’S

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denominations that have female leadership.2 Specifically, in several instances, contemporary

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Byzantine Gender Assumptions and Holiness

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Holiness by Performing a Different Gender Identity

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Performing Cisgender Differently as Holiness

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Women’s Authority and Holiness

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© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Byzantine Hagiographical Insights for Contemporary Gender Discourse

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© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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