TY  - BOOK
AU  - Coon,Lynda L.
TI  - Sacred fictions: holy women and hagiography in late antiquity 
T2  - Middle Ages series
SN  - 9780812233711
PY  - 1997///
CY  - Philadelphia
PB  - University of Pennsylvania Press
KW  - Christian hagiography
KW  - History
KW  - To 1500
KW  - Christian women saints
KW  - Biography
KW  - History and criticism
KW  - Women in Christianity
KW  - Early church, approximately 30-600
KW  - Early church, ca. 30-600
KW  - Middle Ages, 600-1500
N1  - Includes bibliographical references (p. [203]-219) and index; 1. Hagiography and Sacred Models -- 2. Gender, Hagiography, and the Bible -- 3. The Rhetorical Uses of Clothing in the Lives of Sacred Males -- 4. God's Holy Harlots: The Redemptive Lives of Pelagia of Antioch and Mary of Egypt -- 5. "Through the Eye of a Needle": Wealth and Poverty in the Lives of Helena, Paula, and Melania the Younger -- 6. Civilizing Merovingian Gaul: The Lives of Monegund, Radegund, and Balthild -- Conclusion: Sacred Fictions
N2  - Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, examplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxial representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. The sacred fictions of holy women were written within the context of the institutionalization of the male priesthood and the masculinization of church worship, Coon contends. The windows they open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times
ER  -