Book contents
- Social Control in Late Antiquity
- Social Control in Late Antiquity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Women and Children First
- Part II ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters’
- Part III Knowledge, Power, and Symbolic Violence
- Part IV Vulnerability and Power
- Chapter 13 Reading Thecla in Fourth-Century Pontus
- Chapter 14 Family Heroines
- Chapter 15 Women on the Edge
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 14 - Family Heroines
Female Vulnerability in the Writings of Ambrose of Milan
from Part IV - Vulnerability and Power
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2020
- Social Control in Late Antiquity
- Social Control in Late Antiquity
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Part I Women and Children First
- Part II ‘Slaves, be subject to your masters’
- Part III Knowledge, Power, and Symbolic Violence
- Part IV Vulnerability and Power
- Chapter 13 Reading Thecla in Fourth-Century Pontus
- Chapter 14 Family Heroines
- Chapter 15 Women on the Edge
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores the literary use to which the bishop Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) put two of his female relatives: his sister Marcellina, who was a consecrated virgin in Rome, and their ancestor the martyr Sotheris. I will argue that Ambrose exploited the meanings conveyed by these two women to justify his past as an imperial officer, strengthen his legitimacy as bishop, and depoliticise his interventions in imperial politics. Ambrose’s discourse relied on long-established Roman and Christian notions of femininity that depicted women as domestic and vulnerable objects of pity. At delicate moments during his episcopate, however, Ambrose reinterpreted these traditional images and narratives in original ways and used the symbol of his female relatives to foreground a distinctively Christian model of authority, which differed from aristocratic rule and imperial bureaucratic structures.
Keywords
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- Information
- Social Control in Late AntiquityThe Violence of Small Worlds, pp. 299 - 317Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020