Uneven Ground: Pilgrimage and Gender in Late Antiquity

In response to the 'global renaissance in pilgrimage' (British Pilgrimage Trust) and ever-increasing interest in reconstructing lived experiences of historical women, this dissertation will explore how pilgrimage enabled Christian women in the Late Antique Mediterranean (300 - 700 AD) to assert control over religious expression. As the first study to systematically consider Late Antique female pilgrims, synthesising material and textual evidence, this dissertation will challenge narratives of early pilgrimage as ultimately a masculine phenomenon.

Moving beyond reductive paradigms of religiosity facilitating either gendered emancipation or oppression, this project will reassess early Christian gender dynamics, enshrining the importance of female voices.

Early Christian female pilgrims faced significant obstacles in their quests for religious fulfilment, yet their ability to conduct such spiritual journeys within the confines of a patriarchal system demonstrates significant agency. However, this agency is often diminished, even excluded, from current scholarly discourse. The reasons for this are two-fold.

Firstly, no work has systematically compiled and analysed the evidence for non-elite female pilgrims. Secondly, the continued application of the outdated anthropological model of communitas (Turner, 1973) within Late Antique pilgrimage studies, positing that pilgrims were rendered genderless (or classless, etc.) to erase hierarchies, has led to depictions of 'exceptional' female pilgrims as androgenous and desexualised.

These entwined issues have resulted in one-dimensional reconstructions of pilgrim experience; in light of methodological advancements in the fields of anthropology and gender studies (particularly as they relate to Christianity), reconsideration of female pilgrimage is urgently needed.

My dissertation will use pilgrimage (defined according to McCorriston's [2011] five attributes) as a heuristic lens to reconstruct religious experiences of early Christian women, underscoring the extent to which they were able to define their own religiosity (while remaining gendered irrevocably), within the wider Mediterranean and linguistic milieux of Greek, Latin and Coptic. I will argue that the religiously motivated travels of 'ordinary' and 'elite' women alike were indelibly and symbiotically interlaced within gender and religious discourses.

Pivotal to my research is building a new database of female travellers (named and unnamed) and pilgrimage sites, creating a representative dataset from which to draw conclusions; here I will use the widest conception of 'pilgrim' to ensure highly relevant cases are not overlooked. This is particularly crucial for 'ordinary' women, whose pilgrimages were generally more constrained in time and space than their 'elite' counterparts.

I will be examining a range of textual and material evidence (most published or available via online databases, already identified), to unearth trends in the characterisation, localisation and conduct of female pilgrims. The textual material will be analysed in the original Greek, Latin and Coptic, and will comprise genres such as travelogues, hagiography, sermons, ecclesiastical histories, miracles, and letters; the material evidence will include architectural remains of select pilgrimage sites (such as Apa Mena, Apa Shenoute, Baths of Elijah, and Bir Messaouda Basilica), inscriptions (including graffiti), papyri, ostraca, and small finds such as pilgrim's flasks.