By Haylee Saddler

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Jennifer Barry

Abstract

This paper will explore how women in early Christianity navigated through authority, family expectations and taking a path of having a heavy devotion to religion. Asking the main question: How did early Christian texts construct women’s bodies as both sources of temptation and potential holiness, and in what ways did women such as Thecla and Melania the Younger use asceticism to redefine gender norms,expectations, resist social and sexual constraints, and transform bodily renunciation into forms of religious authority within a male-dominated Christian world. This paper will argue how ascetism can be used for women to challenge the expectation surrounding the ideas of marriage, sexuality, obedience and lifestyle expectations. Additionally, this paper takes in how the early female models shape modern Christianity and the the modern Christian debates about women’s authority, and leadership.By looking into both these texts and answering the above research questions within the paper we can identify the lasting influence we can see continued throughout time in views surrounding women’s, bodies, sexuality, and gender. This will also compare how early Christianity and modern Christianity differ from each other through gender roles, and spiritual leadership. It will also compare the lives of two historical female figures, Thecla and Melania the Younger, showing that women were not controlled by the structure within religion, but responsible for reshaping them.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1lkArAJqnpN8fSLIEdej27T9iSXeBAn2lgOQw4ez7hGc/edit?slide=id.g13e1fc50fc5_0_14#slide=id.g13e1fc50fc5_0_14