Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity
Lynda L. Coon
Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries.
Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If ... Read more
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About Lynda L. Coon
Reviews for Sacred Fictions: Holy Women and Hagiography in Late Antiquity
Catholic Historical Review
"One of the best works on hagiography to apear in the last decade."
Church ... Read more
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