In recent years, there has been a trend toward using biography as a lens for examining the larger cultural and historical moment in which a single ancient life was lived. A fine example of this kind of study is Hypatia: the life and legend of an ancient philosopher by Edward J. Watts (2017). That volume, in Oxford's Women in Antiquity series, uses the life of Hypatia, her city Alexandria and the late ancient philosophical and educational scene mutually to illumine each other such that a vibrant picture of late fourth- to early fifth-century Egypt emerges. Another fine example devoted, like the volume under review, to late ancient Christianity, is Andrew S. Jacobs's Epiphanius of Cyprus: a cultural biography of late antiquity (Oakland, Ca 2016). Jacobs asks how a life raises broader questions about the culture in which a given individual lived as well as about the kinds of methodologies and perspectives that modern interpreters have brought to the historical situating of that life. Like the Jacobs volume, Melania uses biography as a lens through which to study the rich, shapeshifting landscapes and sensibilities of Christianity in the late fourth and early fifth centuries as well as the varieties, and sometimes the vagaries, of modern scholarship.
Melania is a collection of fifteen chapters plus an introduction and afterword. The volume focuses on not one but two lives, Melania the Elder (c. 340–c. 410 ce) and her granddaughter, Melania the Younger (c. 385–439 ce), both of whom were prominent aristocratic Christians notable for their ascetic piety, theological learning, involvement in ecclesiastical and monastic controversies and their founding of monasteries in Jerusalem. The volume is dedicated to the renowned scholar of ancient Christianity, Elizabeth A. Clark, a teacher, mentor, colleague and friend of the volume's contributors. Clark was, of course, the scholar responsible for introducing the Melanias to the English-speaking world with her translation of and commentary on Gerontius’ Life of Melania the Younger (Lampeter 1984), and so it is fitting that the volume should be dedicated to her. The fact that so many of the chapters refer to Clark's influential essay, ‘The lady vanishes: dilemmas of a feminist historian after the “linguistic turn”’ (Church History lxxvii [1998], 1–31), is indicative of the revisionist historical perspective that permeates the volume's chapters. As the editors note
Our awareness of history as storytelling has limited historians’ optimism about the ability of ancient texts to reveal the lives of its subjects directly. The Melanias exist for us in a mediated and elliptical way, simultaneously brought into vivid individual focus by their narrators ancient and modern and yet irretrievably distanced, woven back into larger fields of discourse that themselves come into focus only through the texture of that same narration (pp. 5–6).
This collection uses multiple focal points to present the two Melanias both as individuals and as ‘small points of intersection amid a variety of much larger historical entities’ (p. 6). In my view, the most enlightening and teacherly aspect of the volume is its pursuit of its goal of viewing its two protagonists as ‘small representatives of larger historical forces’ (p. 4). The arrangement of the chapters gives a sense both of those larger historical forces and well as of the scholarly topics that make the Melanias relevant to contemporary academic interests: aristocracy, body and family, gender and memory, wisdom and heresy, holy places and the reception history of the Lives of the Melanias. As the editors point out in their introduction, the age of the Melanias was marked by fierce controversy concerning the very nature and practice of Christianity, and this volume illustrates the richness as well as the conundrums of that age by looking at Christianity though the lens, as it were, of these two Roman women.
Space will not permit in-depth consideration of all fifteen chapters. Briefly, these are the authors and the perspectives that they offer. In Section i, ‘Aristocracy’, Catherine M. Chin shows in ‘Apostles and aristocrats’ how material things like buildings both constrain and produce the actions that make up a human life. Continuing the theme of building and place, Christine Luckritz Marquis, in ‘Namesake and inheritance’, focuses on the intertwined legacies of grandmother and granddaughter, especially in terms of their monasteries as extensions of wealth and inheritance. Caroline T. Schroeder's chapter, ‘Exemplary women’, employs the sociological theory of ‘intersectionality’ – the intertwining, in one person, of such aspects of identity as class and gender – to deepen understanding of Melania the Younger as embodying both masculine and feminine virtues. Section ii, ‘Body and Family’, includes ‘holy households’ by Maria Doerfler, who argues that traditional views of maternal existence were rescripted in the Life of Melania the Younger to extend the role of mother to an ascetic woman. In ‘Wounded by divine love’ Kristi Upson-Saia discusses ‘the medicalised experience of being wounded’ (p. 96) as a characteristic of early Christian ascetic piety, including the Melanian literature. Section iii, ‘Gender and Memory’, includes, first, ‘Memories of the martyrs’ by Stephanie Cobb. Cobb argues that ascetic texts of the fourth century (the Acta of Perpetua in particular) not only appropriated the language of martyrdom but reformulated it for use in a new context, thus providing models of exemplary behaviour for women in the period of the Melanias. Second in this section is ‘The memory of Melania’ by Rebecca Krawiec, who uses memory theory to interpret the ‘genderqueer’ portrait of Melania the Elder as drawn by Palladius in his Lausiac history.
Section iv, ‘Wisdom and Heresy’, includes three chapters. In ‘A life in letters’, Robin Darling Young mines letters of Evagrius to highlight a view of Melania the Elder as a Gnostic teacher that is strikingly different from the standard view (of both modern scholars and ancient authors like Palladius and Jerome) of Melania anti-Arian and Origenist, that is, as a theological polemicist. Susanna Drake argues in ‘Friends and heretics’ that Melania the Younger was only posthumously ‘conscripted for orthodoxy’ (p. 180) and fits better into an ideology of nobility rather than a newly emergent theological orthodoxy. Continuing the theme of posthumous orthodoxy, Christine Shepardson demonstrates the tendentiousness of Gerontius’ presentation of Melania the Younger as anti-Nestorian. Part v, ‘In the Holy Places’, includes Andrew S. Jacobs's ‘The lost generation’, in which Jacobs uses a politics of empire to assess the role of Jerusalem for fourth-century Christian emigrés as a site of both refuge and exile. Next is Stephen J. Shoemaker's ‘Sing, O daughter(s) of Zion’, which focuses on hymnography in the churches of Jerusalem in the age of the Melanias and especially on Marian veneration in the Jerusalem Georgian Chant book. Finally, part vi, ‘Modernities’, presents three discussions of the reception of the Melanias in later centuries. In ‘Afterlives’, Michael Penn details the discovery of Gerontius’ Life of Melania the Younger in the late nineteenth century and its fate at the hands of scholars and popular media. In ‘Monastic revivals’, Stephen J. Davis discusses ways in which the Melanias have been reclaimed and reinterpreted by the contemporary Coptic Orthodox Church. Elizabeth A. Castelli suggests in ‘The future of sainthood’ that the Life of Melania the Younger can contribute to ‘the broader project of theorizing saintliness in our own moment of vexed political economy’ (p. 280).
One might consider this collection to be a prism, with each chapter forming a facet that adds its reflecting surface to the whole. Although one does not expect that a volume of essays will necessarily be coherent, this collection succeeds, and is both a richly varied scholarly study and a pedagogical aid to rethinking what a cultural biography might be.
