Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: a Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 288; maps, building plans, plates. Cloth, $70. ISBN 0-19-827019-4.
Susan A.
Harvey
Department of Religious Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2002
Vol. 5, No. 2
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv5n2prharvey
Susan A. HARVEY
Stephen J. Davis, The Cult of St. Thecla: a Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 288; maps, building plans, plates. Cloth, $70. ISBN 0-19-827019-4.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol5/HV5N2PRHarvey.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute, 2002
vol 5
issue 2
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Thecla
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[1] Stephen
Davis’ recent book, The Cult of St. Thecla: a
Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity, is an
important and substantial contribution to our study of the cult
of saints in ancient Christianity, and further, to our
reconstruction of women’s piety during the late antique
period. The book marks an exciting shift in the treatment
of saints: turning our attention from multivalent
presentations of the saint herself, to focus on the piety of
those ancient Christians who were her devotees. Davis
brings together the great array of types of evidence that
attest to devotion to the saint, beginning with an astute
discussion of the second century apocryphal Acts of Paul
and Thecla that gave rise to the cult itself.
From there, he leads us through a rich gathering of literary
texts, including variations, translations, expansions of and
additions to the apocryphal story; other types of
literary attestations to Thecla found in sermons, letters, the
vitae of other saints, or other narrative texts;
inscriptions and epigraphical data containing prayers to Thecla
or indicating persons bearing her name; pilgrim
ampullae, combs and other personal items inscribed or
decorated with her image; wall paintings, textiles,
lamps, and grave stelae depicting the saint; and shrines
dedicated to her veneration. The breadth of evidence,
both literary and material, for devotion to Thecla is indeed
impressive.
[2] Insofar
as scholars have looked at this evidence previously, it has
most often been dealt with in discrete contexts. Pilgrim
flasks bearing Thecla’s image, for example, have been
studied in the context of pilgrimage art and activity in late
antiquity. Davis’ intent, however, is not simply to
document the saint’s popularity across the huge
geographical expanse of the ancient Christian world—to
some extent this has been done before. Instead, his
purpose is to reconstruct the piety of the saint’s
devotees: the practices, rituals, expressions, values,
institutions, traditions, and artifacts by which ancient
Christians articulated and enacted veneration to St.
Thecla. In this effort, Davis produces a fascinating
picture of a cult that seems to have been especially important
for women, both in popularity and in social and religious
consequences.
[3] Davis
sets out to examine the cult of St. Thecla in two specific (but
highly important) geographical locations, Asia Minor and
Egypt. Asia Minor might be considered the "epicenter" of
the cult, for Thecla’s shrine at Seleucia was one of the
most popular pilgrim sites of the late antique and early
Byzantine periods. Its extensive archaeological remains
are enhanced by literary evidence of its activity, shown not
only in the elaborate miracle collection associated with it but
also, most famously, by the account the fourth century pilgrim
Egeria provides of her visit there in the 380s. Combining
these materials allows Davis to suggest the particular pattern
of devotional activity followed by pilgrims who visited the
shrine. The liturgical structuring of the pilgrim’s
visit, its material framing by the buildings that defined the
shrine within its landscape of mountain, rock, and spring, and
the connections drawn between the saint’s second century
legend and later miracle accounts from the shrine all served to
shape the pilgrim’s expectations and experiences during a
visit. Whether articulated in narrative form (as in
Egeria’s diary) or through devotional artifact (a flask
of holy oil carried away as a sacred memento), the
pilgrim’s participation in Thecla’s cult was always
a carefully contextualized involvement—the joining of an
individual’s experience to that of larger collective
devotion within the life of the church.
[4] If the
evidence from Asia Minor might be taken as somehow normative
for the cult of St. Thecla in late antiquity, that from Egypt
shows us how the cult could flourish in a different
region. Indeed, it flourished to such an extent that it
eventually established its own form indigenous to that
area. Here Davis presents genuinely fresh material.
From Athanasius’ letters he culls evidence for special
devotion to Thecla among the community of Alexandria’s
consecrated virgins. Traveling into the scattered civic
communities of Egypt’s sprawling deserts, he finds a
wealth of pilgrim flasks, wall paintings and grave stelae
attesting not only to the veneration of Thecla, but further to
important interactions between her cult and those for St. Menas
and others. Davis’ collection of this material
evidence is one of the best features of the book. These
traces allow him to posit a context in which to see Coptic
legends presenting a different, localized Egyptian Thecla as
something more than disconnected or derivative developments of
the earlier Acts and miracle stories from Asia Minor. For
Davis reads these Coptic legends as the emergence of a Thecla
cult indigenous to Egypt, expressing a devotion to the saint so
widely shared among Christians of Egypt that they found a way
to inscribe the saint’s story into their own history and
landscape. This section of the book is especially
intriguing, with Davis’ reading of the hagiographical
material particularly insightful.
[5] Whether
in Asia Minor or in Egypt, and whether working with narrative
or material evidence, throughout his study Davis insists that
the cult of St. Thecla consistently fostered certain values of
particular significance for women. Time and again,
Thecla’s presentation in legend, image, or artifact
celebrates the values of asceticism (virginity) and pilgrimage
(itineracy), in terms that serve to empower women’s
religious authority and to challenge their traditional social
locations. Davis notes repeatedly how the literary
evidence in particular indicates the efforts of the
ecclesiastical structure to curtail and domesticate the piety
of Thecla devotion, whether through Athanasius’ direction
of the activities of the Alexandrian virgins or the inclusion
of married women among those who obtain miracles at
Thecla’s shrine (here we find Thecla saving marriages by
reconciling estranged spouses: hardly the "happy ending"
envisioned in most of the apocryphal acts of the
apostles!). The socially problematic portrayal of Thecla
in her second century legend seems to have created immediate
dilemmas regarding the status, roles, and activities of women
in early Christian communities, as we know from
Tertullian’s disgruntled complaints. Davis is
arguing that such challenge to the social order was continued
within and through the very piety that characterized devotion
to this saint. For her devotees not only perpetuated the
telling of her (socially disruptive) story, but further,
themselves engaged in mimetic acts of devotion expressive of
the same qualities. Favoring virginity or chastity in
marriage, often intent on religious travel (pilgrimage) that
might defy adequate male supervision, Thecla’s late
antique devotees were not always submissive to traditional
institutional authorities, nor easily assimilated into those
structures. It would seem, Davis argues, that the
(social) effects of Thecla’s story profoundly marked the
lives of her devotees, for many generations.
[6] Because
Davis has produced such a rich study of the Thecla cult in two
distinct regions, the book begs for more. Evidence for
devotion to Thecla in Syriac tradition, for example, if less
extensive archaeologically than what remains in Egypt, is no
less significant in the issues it raises (see the article in
the present issue of Hugoye by Burris and Van Rompay).
Moreover, one would like to see how Davis’ model might be
addressed to the cults of other saints. Such explorations
lie beyond the scope of this book, but not beyond the scope of
its readers! Davis has done a great service with this
study. May others respond in kind.