Department of Classical Archaeology

Paper delivered at the workshop titled "Facing new materials: Changes of Writing Substances, Implements and Supports in Manuscript Cultures" at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, Germany (25th-26th January 2024)

Paper delivered at the digital Early Careers Conference titled "Amplifying the Voices of Student and Early Career Archaeologists" (24 July 2024) from the CIfA Early Careers Special Interest Group and the Council for British Archaeology as part of the Council for British Archaeology's Festival of Archaeology (13-28 July 2024)

The pilgrimages of wealthy and aristocratic ladies in late antiquity is well attested in literary sources, but this can tell us relatively little about the experiences of the ordinary women that made up the majority of female pilgrims. Combining literary and archaeological evidence, however, can help create a framework to facilitate a better understanding of the experiences of these women, their interaction with other pilgrims, and how the local economy catered to their needs.

This paper will explore female pilgrimage through the case study of Abu Mina, a well recorded and excavated site combining architectural evidence, small finds and literary sources. Excavations of the sacred complex and surrounding town have shown the presence of gender segregated facilities for bathing, accommodation, and possibly baptism, suggesting that women constituted a large proportion of visiting pilgrims, with enough economic influence to legitimize the construction of physically separate spaces. The connection of Saint Menas with fertility miracles in literary sources is supported by locally produced statuettes of pregnant women found across the site and in nearby Alexandria, with additional artistic evidence depicting women as active participants in cult activity. An holistic approach to this evidence allows us to conceive of a site that offered a wide range of facilities and products specifically for women, and help us better understand the social composition and motivations of the pilgrim groups that travelled to Abu Mina.

The pilgrimages of a small group of elite women in late antiquity are well
attested in literary sources and have formed the basis for much modern
scholarship on early Christian female pilgrimage. While these sources are
valuable , they tell us relatively little about the experiences of the women
of the middle and lower classes that constituted the majority of female
pilgrims. This paper takes an holistic approach to the material and literary
evidence from three early Christian shrines, with the aim of combining
miracle texts, pilgrim accounts, architectural remains and small finds in
order to move away from subjective judgements about individual women,
and towards a more inclusive understanding of female pilgrimage as a
phenomenon.

This paper will focus on evidence from three case studies: the shrines of
St Menas at Abu Mina, St Simeon the Elder at Qal’at Sem’an, and St
Thecla at Seleucia. The sources from these sites will be integrated in a
thematic approach looking at how different aspects of pilgrimage were
shaped by gender and how they could impact female experience. These
will include the dangers of travel (in particular sexual assault),
accommodation and amenities, access to sacred space, and products
available for purchase. Through analysis of this evidence we can learn
about where pilgrims were travelling from, the formation and function of
segregated spaces, and how sites catered to female visitors as a specific
demographic. Ultimately it will show that opportunities for pilgrimage
were open to a wide section of society and were not limited to wealthy
elites or dedicated virgins.

Elite female pilgrims are some of the most celebrated and well-studied women of Late Antiquity. The narratives surrounding the travels of women such as Egeria or Paula constitute a large proportion of our knowledge about pilgrimage practice in general and have formed the focus for the study of gender and pilgrimage in particular. This bias towards famous literary sources and elite experience, however, obscures our understanding of the “normal” women who made up the majority of female pilgrims. This article seeks to redress this imbalance by integrating material and textual sources from three sites of early Christian pilgrimage in order to better understand the interconnected relationship women had with these shrines. Evidence from the shrines of Saint Menas at Abu Mina, Saint Simeon the Stylite the Elder at Qal’at Sem’an, and Saint Thecla at Seleucia show how gender could shape pilgrimage experience and how sites recognised women as a specific visitor demographic and catered to their needs. This was achieved through the provision of narratives related to the dangers of pilgrimage, segregated spaces, and products aimed at women to purchase. In a wider sense, it argues that many women in Late Antiquity had greater freedom to travel and move in public spaces than is often recognised and that this freedom was not necessarily dependent on marital or sexual status.

The cultivation of beauty is often considered to have been of paramount importance in the lives of ancient women. It is therefore unsurprising that one of the most widely recognisable images of a woman from Late Antiquity depicts a matron adorning herself, found on the fourth-century Projecta Casket. Scholarship has placed this famous toilet scene, and others like it, firmly in the domestic sphere of the domus, mysterious and normally hidden from the outside world.

This paper argues, however, that we have misunderstood these images, having been too ready to accept adornment as inherently feminine, private, and ultimately linked to seduction and sexuality. A close reading of both the iconography and relevant literary sources indicates that they do not represent private domestic scenes, but the performance of adornment in the context of the public bathhouse. I argue that such bathing ceremonies were part of the growing culture of spectacle in Late Antiquity more broadly, a chance for individuals of both sexes to assert their position in the social hierarchy. This reveals an important new facet of the public construction and expression of power in late antique society, an area normally thought to be reserved exclusively for men.

This article explores the evidence for female pilgrims to the early Christian shrine of Saint Menas at Abu Mina in Egypt. From this evidence it then analyses how gender was constructed at the site, both in the material remains of buildings and small finds, and in the imagined literary landscape of miracle texts. The sources indicate that women were a major visitor demographic at the shrine, which actively catered to their specific needs. Many of these women were also young women of childbearing age, challenging the notion that freedom to travel was primarily restricted to widows and virgins.

In the mid seventh century CE, Abbess Eugenia constructed a new entrance for her monastery in the Visigothic city of Emerita. Unfortunately, Eugenia’s construction does not survive and was not described by contemporary authors. All we know about Eugenia and her benefaction comes from an inscription, excavated near the Basilica of Santa Eulalia, which describes and celebrates her undertaking. This inscription is the only evidence we have for Eugenia and her monastery. It raises questions about the abbess and her community, and about the potential of inscriptional evidence. Material evidence for women’s monasticism in Late Antiquity is sparse and understudied, meaning our knowledge is based on textual sources, generally written by men. Eugenia’s inscription is therefore a valuable source for assessing how a female monastic related to her community and how she helped construct it, both physically and spiritually. In this paper I ask what this inscription can tell us about Eugenia’s community, her role as abbess and patron, and about the intersection of gender, religion, and agency in Visigothic Emerita.

Sculptures of wealthy individuals represented nude or semi-nude in the guise of heroes or deities were relatively common in Roman art. Matrons with the sensuous curves of Venus or emperors with the bulging physique of Jupiter wore a nude ‘costume type’ reflecting characteristic virtues of their status and gender. It is generally assumed, however, that the eventual disappearance of such statuary by late antiquity speaks at least partly to more prudish Christian attitudes to the body. This chapter will argue that such a restricted focus on one visual medium and the polemics of churchmen has left us with a distorted picture. With the statue habit in steep decline in late antiquity, we must look to other genres of visual representation. When we do, we see that societal attitudes to the nude female body were not as simple as such literary sources suggest. This chapter will focus on the small corpus of images in mosaic and metal-work spanning the fourth and fifth centuries AD which continue the earlier tradition of representing women nude or semi-nude. Through these examples, we can explore how approaches to the female body intersected with age and class, and can complicate our understanding of the role that the body could play in constructing ideal femininity.

Painted portraits on wood and cloth were common in the ancient world and prized as authentic and lifelike images. Affordable, portable, and desirable, they were an important form of representation, but rarely survive in the archaeological record outside Egypt. This article approaches the study of painted portraiture in a way that does not necessitate the survival of the images themselves. It analyzes evidence for the use, reuse, and imitation of painted portraits in the catacombs of 4th-c. Rome by examining the remains of settings and attachments for portraits, the shadows left by them on walls, and portraits in other media which imitate panel paintings. The article considers why painted portraits were so effective in funerary contexts and what connection they may have had to domestic portraiture. It also explores the development of panel portrait imitation through the phenomenon of the “square nimbus.”

OPEN ACCESS LINK:
https://academic.oup.com/past/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/pastj/gtad017/7516952?utm_source=advanceaccess&utm_campaign=past&utm_medium=email

In Late Antiquity, as today, women’s veiling was a contentious topic. Early Christian churchmen wrote about it at length, exhorting women to cover and criticizing those they considered were not veiling appropriately. According to these writers, veils were an essential garment tied to Christian modesty and religious ideas about female submission to male authority. Modern scholarship has tended to side with these clergymen, often claiming that with the rise of Christianity came the social expectation that adult women cover their heads. However, veiling had been a part of life in the Mediterranean for centuries, and the frustration and frequency with which churchmen urged women to veil suggests that contemporary practices often diverged significantly from their expectations. This article examines veiling and head-covering as a complex social practice shaped by numerous intersectional and situational factors beyond religion, including status, practicality, fashion and social context. It explores a wide range of visual and material culture to illuminate the diversity of veiling beyond the diatribes of churchmen. Throughout, how we understand veiling in the past is brought into dialogue with scholarship on modern Islamic veiling to address biases towards veiled women and to find new ways of centring women’s experiences and everyday practices.

Without any doubt, the human skull represents an important transcultural symbol. From skull cult up to a symbol of transitoriness, the human skull was interpreted from very different points of view. From a scientific viewpoint, the human skull is of particular importance for archaeology, cultural anthropology, and biological anthropology. Skulls are used for taxonomic purposes in the context of paleoanthropology but also for sex and age determination of skeletal remains. The basis for this use of human skulls is its symbolic importance. The aim of the present paper is the analysis of human skulls in an anthropological as well as archaeological context.