The Lady Appears: Materializations of "Woman" in Early Monastic Literature

According to a famous monastic saying, the Egyptian desert in Late Antiquity was the place where, as in some recent theory about gender in history, "there are no women." ¹ To be sure, the desert was filled with thoughts of women, memories of abandoned wives and mothers, and demonic specters of women, but monks claimed that there were few, if any, flesh-and-blood women in their desert. Likewise, Elizabeth Clark has invited historians of Christianity to consider the prospect that our sources present us not with real women from the past, but with male authors' fantasies about or rhetorical uses of women, no more than the gendered literary "traces" of elusive "real women." ² Imagine, then, the surprise of a group of lay tourists—and perhaps our surprise as well—when their representative monk turned out to be really a woman:

Some worldly people visited a certain anchorite, and when he saw them he received them with joy, saying, "The Lord sent you so that you would bury me. For my call is at hand, but for the benefit of you and of those who hear (your report), I shall tell you about my life. As for me, brothers, I am a virgin in my body, but in my soul up to now I have been inhumanly under attack by fornication. Look, I am speaking to you, and I behold the angels waiting to take my soul, and Satan meanwhile standing by and suggesting thoughts of fornication to me." Having said these things, he stretched himself out and died. While dressing him the worldly people found that he truly was a virgin. ³

The radical confirmation of the monk's claim about himself—"a virgin in my body"—made possible by the appearance of a female body only underscores what the monk presumably left unsaid about him/herself. Whatever truths the monk may have told his admiring visitors "about my life," perhaps only summarized here, his body, once he stopped talking, told a different truth: he was a woman. At the end of the male monk's discourse, the lady appears. So the story, presumably told by the visitors, says. This surprise was too good to tell only once: a longer and more complicated apophthegmaabout Abba Bessarion likewise climaxes with a monk revealed to be a woman at his death (Apoph. patr., Bessarion 4). The heroine of the later Life of St. Pelagia the Harlotlives for three or four years disguised as a male monk in Jerusalem, until her death reveals her ruse. ⁴ From here the motif of the transvestite ascetic multiplied in early and medieval Christian literature; the abundant detail of these later narratives provides fertile ground for complex scholarly readings on several levels. ⁵

In contrast to later medieval tales, the two apophthegmata in which dead monks are revealed to be women are spare. For example, the Life of Pelagiaexplains why its heroine chose to disguise herself as a man: a reformed actress and "prostitute," she sought to escape her wealth and notoriety in Antioch for a life of ascetic anonymity. "She held her fortune to be worse than blood and fouler than the smelly mud of the streets"; wearing clothes given her by Bishop Nonnus, she fled to Jerusalem to live as a monk. ⁶ In contrast, the apophthegmatanarrate only the postmortem discovery of the monks' cross-dressing, leaving it to scholars to offer plausible reasons for an ascetically inclined woman in fourth- or fifth-century Egypt to have impersonated a male monk. First, solitary women in the desert faced the risks of robbery and sexual assault: passing as a man provided some (but not complete) protection from such dangers. ⁷ Second, sayings about and attributed to Amma Sarah, one of the very few named female anchorites in the apophthegmata, indicate that some male monks...