Ascentism and Women's Freedom in Christian Late Antiquity

Some Aspects of Thecla Cults and Egeria's Journey

抄録

How women involved with history? Recently, there have been many attempts to scrutinize the women's experiences in history. ln this article, I try to reconstruct the women's traditions in late antique Christian society in the Mediterranean World, by reading some written materials on women, especially about Saint Thecla and a woman pilgrim Egeria.
 First of all, I briefly summarize the new tide of the reinterpretations of the late antique female hagiographies. In spite of the strong misogynistic tendency of the Church Fathers, Christian societies in late antiquity left us a vast amount of the Lives of female saints. We can easily realize how some aristocratic women had great influence on the society through ascetic renunciation. However, we should bear in mind the text was distorted by male authors.
 On the account of the problem, I pick out the legendary heroine Thecla. She is the heroine of an apocryphal text called the Acts of Paul and Thecla. In the Acts, she is really independent. She abandons her fiancé and her mother and follows Paul in the first part. On the second part, Paul disappears and she baptizes herself in the battle with wild beasts. At that time, crowd of women encourage her. Though there have been many disputations about the mythological Acts, all scholars agree with the “fact” that late antique women accepted the Thecla Acts as the story for themselves.
 In spite of serious condemnation of Tertullian, Thecla cults flourished throughout the late antique times and a woman pilgrim Egeria visited her shirine Hagia Thecla in Asia Minor. She left us a precious testimony of “real” woman in the ancient times. The analysis of her using the grammatical subject “ego” in her diary is my original idea.