Afterword

This essay delineates the impact of gender studies, theories of religion, and hagiography on fields of patristics and the history of Christianity more broadly, with a particular focus on the influence of the work of Elizabeth A. Clark.

Posthumous Orthodoxy

Melania the Younger died more than a decade before the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) and the ensuing bitter conflicts between Chalcedonian and miaphysite Christians. Nevertheless, the Greek Vita by Gerontius portrays her as actively involved in numerous religious and political controversies surrounding bishop Nestorius preceding her death. This chapter argues that the historicity of her alleged anti-Nestorian activities in the Vita must remain in doubt. The anti-Nestorian Melania of the Greek Vita appears to support Gerontius’s miaphysite condemnation of the politically dominant Chalcedonian Christians, providing him with a useful weapon in the pressing Christological battles he faced following her death. While the anti-Nestorian stance Gerontius attributed to Melania remained orthodox in Greek Christianity, his anti-Chalcedonian views, which he considered the natural extension of Melania’s, did not. Gerontius’s Vita Melania thus serves as a microcosm of the complex and highly politicized fifth-century disputes over the definition of Christian orthodoxy.

Afterlives

In 1903, the Vatican’s secretary of state, Cardinal Mariano Rampolla was heir apparent to the papacy. But he became unexpectedly out of a job due to a veto by the Austro-Hungarian emperor. Rampolla retreated to a life of scholarship to edit a manuscript he had discovered in a monastic library decades earlier, Gerontius’s Life of Melania the Younger. Rampolla’s publication spawned a series of early twentieth-century reactions to Melania’s biography. This work sometimes appeared in scholarly journals. Much appeared in popular press articles such as one that compared Melania’s fasts to those of early twentieth-century suffragettes’ or a series of newspaper headlines referring to “the richest woman in the history of the world!” The hagiography also inspired early twentieth-century imitations, such as Sainte Mélanie, a pious and expanded version of Melania’s Life. This chapter examines an earlier rediscovery of this “indomitable little saint” who was seen as “Richer than Rockefeller.”

Sing, O Daughter(s) of Zion

As the Christianization of civic life progressed rapidly throughout the Roman Empire, one of the most effective means by which Christianity came to inhabit the Empire’s cities was through the development of public liturgy. Ritual practices that had once been held in private, often in the homes of individual Christians, now emerged into the public sphere, even in the streets of the city itself, with the establishment of stational and processional liturgies. Memories of the apostles and saints were also inscribed onto the urban landscape, as shrines and pilgrimage presented another means of Christianizing this space. Perhaps nowhere are all of these elements more on display than in Jerusalem during the lifetimes of Melania the Elder and Melania the Younger. This chapter explores the unprecedented knowledge of the songs that were sung in late ancient Christian worship, made known through the recently published Jerusalem Georgian Chantbook (iadgari/tropologion).

Friends and Heretics

In the fifth century, the critiques leveled by Pelagius and his supporters troubled Augustine so much that he spent much of his last years refuting the Pelagians and distinguishing his thoughts on sin, sinlessness, and baptism from theirs. Melania the Younger and her husband were caught in the middle of these theological debates, due to their friendly relations with both Pelagius and his supporters and Augustine and his. The Life of Melania the Younger preserves unresolved Pelagian tensions by celebrating Melania’s asceticism and insisting on her humility and sinful nature. In the Latin Vita, in a speech following a miraculous delivery of a stillborn child, Melania defends the purity of babies and bodies, all while reminding her audience of the filthiness of human sin. This chapter examines how the Life negotiates conflicts over theodicy, grace, sin, and the human potential for overcoming sin set in motion by the Pelagian controversy.

Holy Households

From laws that linked a woman's economic independence to the number of children she had birthed to medical handbooks' treatment of fertility and women's portrayal in poetry and panegyric, the birthing and rearing of children appears as one of the defining tasks in late ancient women's lives. While the expansion of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries and the appeal ascetic practice held for members of the imperial elites did not fundamentally change this valuation, they nevertheless precipitated a reconsideration of what constituted motherhood in the first place. This chapter explores the rhetorical construction of motherhood in late ancient ascetic writings, and the interplay between physical and spiritual portrayals of family relations in the lives of late ancient women ascetics.

Apostles and Aristocrats

The Life of Melania the Younger repeatedly refers to Melania and Pinian’s familial house in Rome, a house which “none of the senators in Rome had the means to buy” (Vita 14). This chapter uses the material remains of Roman property, both the family property of Melania, and imperial and episcopal property around the city of Rome, to explore the ways in which late antique concerns over family lineage, inheritance, and the replacement of one generation with another, became intertwined with concerns over apostolic succession, so that the history of Christianity and the history of the Roman aristocracy could become fundamentally the same.

Memories of the Martyrs

Historians of Late Ancient Christianity have often noted the appropriation of the language of martyrdom within ascetic texts. When martyrdom was no longer attainable, many authors fashioned asceticism as a “daily martyrdom.” In The Life of Melania the Younger, Melania participates in numerous “contests,” “combats,” and “battles”; she is “persecuted” and yet she “endures.” This chapter investigates ways that asceticism may not only have fashioned itself as a new martyrdom but also may have claimed earlier martyr texts in the service of new (ascetic) interests. This study approaches the fourth- and fifth-century accounts of the deaths of the third-century North African martyrs, Perpetua and Felicitas, as witnesses to the continued communal interest in the stories of the Carthaginian martyrs during the rise of Christian asceticism. In doing so, it uncovers textual strategies by which the witnessing (martyr) of the saints was made relevant to new ecclesiastical settings.

The Lost Generation

Between the 370s and 410s, notable Christians left the Western Roman Empire to form monastic establishments in the nascent “holy land.” Melania the Elder was among the first wave of these Western ascetic migrants followed—more than a generation later—by her granddaughter. This chapter compares these late ancient émigrés to the so-called Lost Generation of American expatriates who settled in artistic enclaves in Paris between the two World Wars. Both sets of migrations highlight the relationship between colonized space (post-War Paris, post-Constantinian Jerusalem) and the pursuit of virtuosity (literary, ascetic). The other space of migration highlights the failures of an imperial center, yet that center is never fully disavowed. Indeed, the fondest hope of the Lost Generation migrants is that their displaced virtuosity will reconstruct the cultural and moral core of (American, Roman) empire by producing a new aristocracy of talent.

A Life in Letters

In Palladius’ Lausiac History, Melania appears as an eyewitness to events and a direct informant of his accounts of Evagrius and other solitaries. Among other roles, Melania functions as a prophet of the fall of Rome and a voice of a Christian sibyl, warning senators and their wives against the coming of the Antichrist. Along with Paulinus of Nola’s Letter 29, and Jerome’s short and scathing reference, Palladius’ encomiastic passages on Melania are the sole description of this “female man of God,” apart from the letters that seem to have been addressed to her by her alleged student Evagrius of Pontus. This chapter compares Evagrius’ implied description of Melania in his letters, with that of Palladius’ portrait to determine where and how the latter has adjusted the former.