Unquiet Women

by Adams, Max;

  The Christian Jerusalem that Egeria knew at the end of the fourth century was substantially the vision of Constantine the Great and his mother, Helena. He was acclaimed emperor in York – Eboracum – in the province of Britannia in 306 after the death of his father, the co-emperor Constantius. Six years later he defeated his rival Maxentius in a great battle at the Milvian Bridge on the Tiber River, inspired by a vision of Christ. In 313 he promulgated an edict at Milan that enshrined tolerance towards Christians in Roman law; twelve years later he convened the Council of Nicæa, to which bishops came from across the Roman world, establishing orthodoxy in worship and theology. Before his death in 337, he was baptised.

  In his last years, Constantine seems to have supplied the funds for Helena to construct, beautify and otherwise enhance the monuments of Christianity in the Holy Land. In a uniquely early campaign of what we would now call biblical archaeology, she is supposed* to have identified the site of the Crucifixion and the physical remains of the True Cross; she built the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and another on the Mount of Olives. She had Hadrian’s temple, which stood on the site of Calvary, torn down and Constantine ordered the construction of a shrine there to surround the entrance to the cave where Christ’s body was entombed before his resurrection.

  Egeria knew these places some fifty years later, by which time much had changed. The shrine had been enclosed in a building called the Anastasis, expanding eastwards into a grandiose complex enclosing the hill of Golgotha within a great basilica called the Martyrium. These buildings became the focus for pilgrimage and intense veneration, especially during the lengthy celebrations concentrated on the commemoration of the resurrection at Easter.

  Loving sisters, I am sure it will interest you to know about the daily services they have in the holy places… All the doors of the Anastasis are opened before cock-crow each day, and the monks and nuns… come in, and also some lay men and women, at least those who are willing to wake at such an hour…

  On the seventh day, the Lord’s day, there gather in the courtyard before cock-crow all the people, as many as can get in… The courtyard is the ‘basilica’ beside the Anastasis, that is to say, out of doors, and lamps have been hung there for them… Soon the first cock crows, and at that the bishop enters, and goes into the cave in the Anastasis. The doors are all opened, and all the people come into the Anastasis, which is already ablaze with lamps.

  Egeria goes on to describe the prayers and psalms, how the Anastasis is filled with a heady odour from the censers taken into the cave. She evokes a strong sense of mystery, of anticipation, of a profound connection to the tragedy and wonder of the ascension. She goes on to describe the special ceremonies associated with Pentecost:

  Just after seven in the morning, when the people have rested, they all assemble in the Great Church on Golgotha. And on this day in this church, and at the Anastasis and the Cross and Bethlehem, the decorations really are too marvellous for words. All you can see is gold and jewels and silk… You simply cannot imagine the number, and the sheer weight of the candles and the tapers and lamps…

  Through the penitential fasting of Lent and in the Great Week of Easter, as she calls it, Egeria’s account conjures an atmosphere of devotion, of endurance, of fascination with what had now become a sophisticated and highly developed liturgy. The late fourth-century Easter celebrations in Jerusalem were an intense and deeply absorbing experience, of which Egeria is an unsurpassed witness. They testify to the physical endurance and sacrifices of the faithful and to the magic of the resurrection cult and biblical miracles that had drawn her and her indefatigable companions from the Atlantic edge of the known world to marvel and affirm their faith in the sands of Jordan.

  Egeria’s writings, so fortunately preserved, are a unique record of a woman’s restless thirst for adventure and hunger to affirm her faith by the physical experience of immersion in the lands of the Bible. They are a founding canon for those unquenchably curious women like Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, Margery Kempe and Celia Fiennes,† for whom the thrill and risk of travel are irresistible.

  The Spitalfields sarcophagus

  During the 1990s, archaeologists excavating the site of the former vegetable market at Spitalfields, just east of the City of London, retrieved the remains of a close contemporary of Egeria. In the 1980s I had spent three years excavating the remains of hundreds of individuals from the crypt of nearby Christ Church, Spitalfields, so I took a particular interest in the story.‡ The woman, buried in a lead casket elaborately decorated with scallop shell motifs and itself encased in a stone sarcophagus, was no native of Britain: analysis of lead isotopes from her teeth suggests that she may actually have been born in Rome. If so, she is the only known burial from the Roman period in Britain to have certainly been a native of the imperial metropolis.

  After 1,700 years, even a body encased in lead has long ago lost all its flesh. The forensic anthropologist has only bones and grave goods with which to reconstruct something of her life and milieu. The Spitalfields woman died in her twenties. She was 1.6 metres (5 ft 3 in) tall and, according to Rebecca Redfern, curator of human osteology at the Museum of London, she was light-boned, like a dancer. There is no skeletal indication of the cause of her death at such a young age; apart from some very severe disorders or traumas that leave traces on bone, we are left guessing at the sorts of diseases rife in busy towns – influenza or smallpox, perhaps – that may have caused her fatal illness.§

  Death from disease in one’s twenties is quite unusual, even in ancient populations. It is a common misconception that in the pre-modern period ‘everyone died young’. A woman like the one found at Spitalfields, having survived infancy and adolescence, might expect to live into her sixties or seventies – so long as she did not succumb to the dangers of multiple childbirths. It is not even clear from her skeleton if this woman had borne children.

  The evidence of her funeral rite is more illuminating. She had been buried in some sort of silk shroud embroidered with gold thread. Silk was not produced in Britain; it must have come from much further south and east – as an heirloom, perhaps, or a special import: this woman was not poor. Bay leaves had been placed or scattered about her; objects of jet and glass lay around the sarcophagus. Most intriguing of all was the presence of a fine glass container, similar to an example excavated in a grave in France that had contained wine. Archaeologist Julian Richards, who studied and filmed the excavation and analysis for his series Meet the Ancestors, speculates that this woman identified herself with a cult of Bacchus, one of many competing Eastern mystery religions with adherents during the late Empire. Even on the cosmopolitan streets of Roman Londinium, she may have been an exotic sight.

  The face of the Spitalfields woman was reconstructed by forensic artists for the programme, using a cast of her skull. I must say I am sceptical of the results of such blending of art and science. It seems to me that there is too much potential for projecting the modern imagination onto the ancient subject. If we want to know how Roman women saw themselves or were seen by their contemporaries, we may find inspiration in the evidence of the mummy portraits of Fayum.

  The Egypt of the first three centuries of the Common Era (CE) was culturally highly diverse, reflecting African, Greek and Roman influences. The Fayum portraits come from a fertile, well-watered lakeland area some 96 kilometres (60 miles) south of Cairo. Here, between the first and third centuries CE, men and women, generally but not exclusively those of wealth and rank, were interred as mummies, their bodies embalmed and wrapped in the traditional Egyptian manner. In many instances, portraits of the deceased were painted onto thin board and attached to the front of the head above the outermost wrapping. The result is slightly bizarre and faintly disturbing; but those portraits that have survived time’s ravages and the attentions of nineteenth-century antiquarians and archaeologists provide us with a stunning gallery of very real, richly characterful faces. Many have found their way into the collections of museums in Britain and of th
ese the most arresting, I think, is that of an unnamed woman from Hawara of about the same age as the Spitalfields individual. Her image now sits in the National Museum of Scotland. Judging by her hairstyle, braided and tightly wound around her head, she died in about 100 CE. She wears clusters of trident earrings with pearl terminals and a jet and jewel choker. A gold and emerald necklace hangs from her neck over a rich red tunic. Her brows are arched and carefully plucked; her brown eyes are framed with kohl and her bearing is proud, even haughty. She may, to an extent, be an objectified amalgam of her loved ones’ fond memories and the flattering skills of the artist who painted her in rich pigments blended with melted wax; but the result is alive with personality. Intriguingly, her earrings, necklace and head braid strongly resemble an image of the hearth-goddess Hestia on a sixth-century Byzantine tapestry.#

  Handmaids of God

  There is substantial evidence that the Near Eastern cult that became Christianity held particular attractions for women across the late Roman empire. The church offered an optimistic view of life after death, especially for the poor and virtuous. Slave or noblewoman, all could aspire to become an ancilla Dei, a handmaid of God, perhaps enjoying a special sense of protection or solidarity with other women since Christ’s mother, the holy Virgin Mary – a model of virtue, motherhood, chastity and abstention – was the object of Christian veneration, prayers and dedications. Christians had suffered particularly severe persecution at the close of the third century and the beginning of the fourth. However, the ‘Great Persecution’ of Diocletian and his successors was reversed by the Emperor Constantine’s declaration of tolerance for Christianity in 313 and its adoption as an imperial cult. Hereafter, worshippers were largely free to express their faith publicly, to belong to formal church communities.

  The names of Christian women worshippers have sometimes survived as inscriptions: Innocentia and Viventia on a spectacular silver cup from the Water Newton hoard (very probably the plate collection of a local church), discovered in Cambridgeshire in 1975; and Iamcilla, from the same hoard, who ‘has discharged the vow which she has promised’. A bone plaque from a late Roman grave in York bears an inscription that reads (in Latin) ‘Hail sister may you live in God’. The life of Marcella, a Roman scholar and Christian patron of the late fourth century, was celebrated in many letters by Jerome, author of the Latin Vulgate Bible whose text she helped to edit. Another of his intimates, Paula, was the founder of a celebrated monastic community at Bethlehem and an inspiration for the ascetics of the desert; she may have met Egeria.

  At Lullingstone in Kent, a wealthy Romano-British family lived in a luxurious villa at the centre of a substantial estate. In its grounds stood a shrine and mausoleum; and in a very private basement room the household venerated the Roman nymphs. By the second half of the fourth century, this room had been turned into something like a private church: discreet but lavishly appointed. On its back wall a frieze was painted, depicting human figures in the so-called orans∫ pose, hands spread out in supplication or prayer. It may be a family portrait. Only fragments survive, but reconstructions show one or two of the figures to be women. A similar representation, more clearly that of a woman, survives on a sarcophagus from Tarragona in Spain. Like the Fayum portraits, these images tell us something about women’s appearance and style.

  Tertullian, the third-century Carthaginian Christian author, in a typically conservative and patriarchal diatribe, has much to say about Christian women’s coiffure, inadvertently providing invaluable evidence for precisely the sorts of hair-dressing and adornment that Christian women, much to his disgust, were sporting in his day. Whether anyone paid attention to Tertullian’s pompous finger-wagging is harder to say:

  What service, again, does all the labour spent in arranging the hair render to salvation? Why is no rest allowed to your hair, which must now be bound, now loosed, now cultivated, now thinned out? Some are anxious to force their hair into curls, some to let it hang loose and flying; not with good simplicity: beside which, you affix I know not what enormities of subtle and textile perukes; now, after the manner of a helmet of undressed hide, as it were a sheath for the head and a covering for the crown; now, a mass [drawn] backward toward the neck. The wonder is, that there is no [open] contending against the Lord’s prescripts! It has been pronounced that no one can add to his own stature. You, however, do add to your weight some kind of rolls, or shield-bosses, to be piled upon your necks! If you feel no shame at the enormity, feel some at the pollution; for fear you may be fitting on a holy and Christian head the slough of some one else’s head, unclean perchance, guilty perchance and destined to hell. Nay, rather banish quite away from your free head all this slavery of ornamentation.1

  Fashionable women, then, might be overtly Christian; or perhaps one should say that Christian women might be overtly fashionable. In any case, their faith was no mere passive observance. Christian communities across the Empire demanded very serious commitment from the faithful, as Egeria’s experience in Jerusalem shows.

  From fourth-century Britain, a number of lead baptismal ‘tanks’ or portable fonts survive, four of which bear a characteristic Constantinian chi-rho monogram (chi X and rho P, being the first two letters of the Greek word Christos, or Christ; when combined they form a cross thus: ☧). Of these, the most intriguing is the fragment of a tank turned up, and damaged by, a farmer’s plough in Walesby, Lincolnshire. The tank had been cast in a sand mould into whose sides had been pressed a wooden relief carving, which appears to depict an actual baptismal ceremony. The main figure in what must have been the central panel of the frieze is a naked woman, a catechumen or prospective convert, flanked by robed and veiled women – deaconesses or companions, perhaps. The panel is separated from those on either side by depictions of columns. Charles Thomas, the pre-eminent expert on Christianity in Roman Britain, considered that the image was a two-dimensional, flattened depiction of an actual baptistery, whose walls had been, as it were, pictorially folded out onto the side of the tank. The candidate in question must, we suppose, have stepped into the real, physical tank, filled with holy water, for the ceremony.

  Women played a significant social and spiritual role in the adoption of Christianity in the last century of the Empire. But the stories of Egeria and the Christian women recorded on lead tanks and inscriptions raise the question of what official positions women might have held in the functioning and spread of early Christianity. By the sixth century, deaconesses were common in the church and the frieze on the Walesby tank probably reflects one of their principal functions: to prepare women for baptism.Ω But female deacons,≈ who were ordained so that they could officiate among church members of both sexes, were increasingly proscribed – officially, at least. Even so, female church patrons, widows, virgins and those who presided over monastic communities were all actors in the complex functioning of a sophisticated ecclesiastical institution. Every attempt by the church hierarchy to impose canonical orthodoxy in matters of theology, liturgy or administration shows, paradoxically, a kaleidoscopic variety of ideas, practice and organisation in which women were fully integrated.

  Hypatia of Alexandria

  It is easy, and tempting, to see the adoption of Christianity as a marker for the emergence of women onto the pages of medieval history. But there is a flip side to the coin. The violent death of the mathematician, philosopher and teacher Hypatia (c.350–415) at the hands of a Christian mob ensured her lasting celebrity in fiction, drama, painting and film. She has often been held up as a ‘pagan’ martyr and many historians believe that behind her grotesque end, inverted, lies the legend of St Catherine.∂

  The Alexandria that Egeria visited in the 380s was a Graeco-Egyptian city of intellect and learning, political intrigue and religious conflict. It was a melting pot of Jewish and Greek, African, Byzantine and Roman peoples, rife with sectarian tension, philosophical debate and gnostic contemplation. The greatest library in the ancient world flourished here and scholars were still drawn to this city t
o learn from the inheritors of Hellenistic scientific traditions. Euclid had written his Elements here in the third century BCE.

  During the fourth century, Alexandria’s pre-eminent mathematician was Theon, from whom several editions of, and commentaries on, Euclid and Ptolemy survive in part or whole. He recorded observations of solar and lunar eclipses and seems to have taught, perhaps as its principal, at the Alexandrian school of philosophy known as the Museion. That his daughter, Hypatia, was a gifted mathematician in her own right is evident, both from Theon’s acknowledgement of her as his co-editor and in the work of her pupils.

  The writings of her most celebrated protégé, Synesius – which include the surviving text of a letter to his tutor, begging her for help with the building of a hydrometer – reveal a woman of substantial character and intellect, with the technical capability to construct such instruments as astrolabes. Possessed of a wry and earthy sense of humour, she famously fended off a persistent young suitor, perhaps one of her pupils, by showing him a soiled sanitary towel, asking if he found much beauty therein. Hypatia is said to have remained celibate all her life. She was a gifted lecturer, able to bring the complexities of conic geometry and higher-level equations into the realms of comprehension for her students. That she lived into her sixties suggests that she must have tutored hundreds of Alexandrians.