Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources

Harlots of the Desert. A study of repentance in early monastic sources. By Benedicta Ward. (Cistercian Studies Series, 106.). Pp. ix+113. Oxford: Mowbray, 1987. $25.95 (cloth), S11.95 (paper). 0 26 467152 X; o 26 4667 39 5 Roads to Paradise. Reading the lives of the early saints. By Alison Goddard Elliott. Pp. xvi + 244 incl. 7 figs. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (for Brown University Press), 1987 (1988). £16.75; $30. 087451 3898 Women in the Earliest Churches. By Ben Witherington m. (Society for New Testament Studies, monograph ser. 59) Pp. xiii + 300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. £27.50. 0521 34648 7 These are three distinguished books of very different kinds, joined by some common concerns, among them an interest in women and female models in early Christianity; they are also linked in that each raises questions about the interpretations of text, in particular the sorts of text where 'fact' and 'fiction' can be hard to distinguish. Since Ward and Elliott overlap most, I will take them first. Sister Benedicta Ward's rather quaintly titled book (she also uses the word 'harlot' frequently in the body of the text) is a beautifully written and scholarly miniature with an avowed Christian purpose. It focuses on the theme of the repentant sinner in early Christian literature, taking a number of specific examples of sinners-turned-saints and providing for further study a list of extracts from the source material for each. It so happens that they arc all female: Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt, Pelagia, Thais, Mary the niece of Abraham, all of them (except the first, who was however frequently cited in conjunction with the others) figures known from the literature of eastern monasticism and the desert Fathers. These repentant prostitutes, as Benedicta Ward points out, have excited the imagination of many artists and writers from the Middle Ages to the present day; their fascination for such figures as Anatole France recalls the immense influence of the related theme of the temptations of St Antony for, for example, Flaubert and Cezanne in nineteenth-century France. Benedicta Ward approaches them from a very different standpoint, through the use made of them by medieval writers, especially Humbert of Romans and Hrotswitha of Gandesheim; the extracts she provides are from the Latin versions of the stories, and she is very much aware of the potency of the image they presented in the medieval West. The fact that these reformed sinners are all women is not what interests the author most, although she is fully conscious of the extra piquancy it adds to their tales, as when the Bishop Nonnus was able through his own great holiness to admire Pelagia's beauty without fear of sexual temptation, unlike his less sanctified companions. Some of them, once repentant and dedicated to the holy life, dressed as men; but, whereas others might explain this in anthropological terms, for instance, as indicative of marginality, Benedicta Ward's forthright discussion claims it as an assertion of femininity (a term which many feminists