Dickison, 'Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Life-styles', Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 9409
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmmr/bmmr-9409-dickison-women

@@@@94.9.5, Clark, Women in Late Antiquity

Gillian Clark, <i>Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian
Life-styles. </i>Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Pp. 155. $35.00.
ISBN 0-19-814675-2.
  Reviewed by Sheila K. Dickison -- University of Florida

  This little gem of a book (a mere 141 pages of text and an
extensive bibliography of recent work) is a delight to read and
leaves one wanting more.  Much of the recent explosion of
scholarship on Roman women concentrates on the late republic and
early empire.  Clark chooses instead to examine the lives of
women in the third to the late sixth century AD or rather "the
ways in which women's lives are perceived, interpreted and (if
possible) regulated in terms of leading ideas, priorities,
assumptions, and interests" (p. 2).  As she recognizes, the
sources, pagan and patristic, are "daunting" in quantity and the
period itself complicated by the range of time and space
covered--not to mention the difficult question of the
relationship of pre-Christian to Christian culture.

  C. sets herself a simple but challenging task:  "to give some
basic information on women's lives in late antiquity and to make
a start on answering some basic questions:  to what extent could
women choose what to do?  What social, practical, or legal
constraints limited their choices?  What options were available
besides (or within) marriage and housekeeping?  What was
housekeeping like/ what level of education or health care was
available? What conduct and ideals were women taught to admire?"
(p. 1).  The difficulty of the task of 'reading' ancient material
about women leads her to view her efforts as constructing "a
patchwork, piecing together scraps of material for a different
purpose and to a different effect from that intended by their
original makers" (p. 4).  She also modestly sees the work as a
"patchwork" in another sense since she says that she has not read
all of the immense amount of surviving material on women in late
antiquity. 

  After a brief introduction C. attempts to answer the questions
she raised in the introduction (see above) in five chapters:  Law
and Morality; Tolerance; Prohibition and Protection; Health;
Domesticity and Asceticism and Being Female.  In a short
conclusion ("edges" since a patchwork can have no conclusion) she
tentatively suggests that there were some practical gains for
women in the late antique period: Christianity allowed some women
for the first time the option to reject marriage and childbearing
in order to devote themselves to God.  Still Christianity
operated within assumptions held for centuries about female
inferiority and weakness.  And in some cases Christianity could
be more disparaging of femaleness.

  The first two chapters use law codes as source material for
women's lives:  principally the Theodosian code and the <i>Corpus
Iuris Civilis</i>.  C. moves the reader through a welter of
evidence to draw some conclusions about "the general conditions
under which women lived, what they were thought to be like, how
they were protected or restricted, and how opinions differed" (p.
13).  Of special interest here is the frequent divergence between
the law of the state and higher demands of Christian teaching and
the ways in which this disjunction may have affected women's
lives.  Two major consequences of this disjunction were
restrictions in female consent for divorce and the removal of
legal impediments to celibacy.

  C. is aware of how slippery legal evidence can be. 
Nevertheless, her survey of examples of law affecting women
isolates some general information about women's lives and how
these lives were affected by the principle of protection for
women and the belief in female weakness.  On the whole though,
these two chapters disappoint, perhaps because the task is too
immense or there are too many unknowns about how legal codes
relate to reality.

  Chapters on Health and Domesticity and Asceticism are more
satisfactory, whether because the sources (medical and material)
are easier to evaluate or we are in the realm of the more
familiar.  Clark is at her best in making sense out of great
amount of medical material on female anatomy, medical skills,
fertility, virginity and so on.  Here she has the benefit of
important work already done by scholars like Riddle, Hanson and
others but that should not detract from her own deft handling of
a vast range of sources.

  Especially insightful is a section on clothing as language and
a close examination of the remarkable mosaic image of Theodora
from the church of San Vitale, Ravenna.  Here C. describes a
method of analysis and applies it with felicitous results to show
how Theodora's presentation is consciously similar to that of
Justinian but also different from his.  A range of evidence from
Christian sources proves her point that women's dress tells us
much about male expectations for female roles and behavior.

  The chapter, On Being Female, is perhaps the best in the book. 
Patristic sources are examined on the nature of women and the way
women should live and compared with the views of non-Christian
philosophers. C. raises important questions for which we do not
have answers:  "Did women internalize the perceptions of
themselves as weak and inferior beings?  Were these assertions
simply, 'protocols', things people felt they had to maintain in
public, whether they really knew about competent women?  How many
people were seriously concerned about whether women had the same
reasoning power as men, or were made, like men, in the image of
God?" (p. 120).  She concludes with the sobering observation that
"the Christian claim that men and women are spiritually equal had
no more practical consequences than the philosophical claim that
women can manifest the same virtues as men" (p. 140).

  With a task of this scope there are bound to be problems:  one
might quibble, for example, at the lack of a theoretical
framework or approach or the tendency to terse statement that
raises more questions than it answers.  At some places in the
text (especially the first two chapters) one gets the impression
that the patchwork is sometimes all too literally that: anecdotal
information about the rich and highborn assembled to make a
point. Despite these problems C. has done a tremendous service in
stitching together a fascinating patchwork of facts and ideas:
lifeways of ancient women, really. Important too that she
recognizes that she has left room for other configurations and
interpretations, perhaps even a tightly woven tapestry of women's
lives.