Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
History, Hayden White remarks, has no distinctively historical method, but borrows its models and methods from a variety of other disciplines. These disciplines, however, have varied over time. Latenineteenth-century German historiography looked to the rigorous procedures of the natural sciences to reconstruct the past “as it actually happened“; mid-twentieth-century historians turned to the social sciences, especially to anthropology and sociology, for their models and methods. More recently, historians' appropriation of (and experimentation with) concepts derived from literary and critical theory has occasioned much heated discussion within the field.
An early version of this paper was delivered as the Antoinette Brown Lecture at Vanderbilt Divinity School on March 21, 1996; I thank the audience for its comments. I also wish to thank members of the North Carolina Research Group on Women in the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, colleagues and former Duke graduate students (especially Dale Martin, Gail Hamner, and Randall Styers), and the two readers for Church History, for their valuable criticisms of earlier versions.
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73. Ibid., 78–81.
74. Ibid., 78–79.
75. Ibid., 80, 82.
76. Ibid., 83.
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131. Ibid. 29; 40; 49 (PG 28,1505,1512,1516–17).
132. Ibid. 53 (PG 58,1520).
133. Ibid. 81; 88 (PG 58,1536,1541).
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139. Ibid. (PG 46, 93, 96–97).
140. Ibid. (PG 46, 53).
141. Ibid. (PG 46,32–33,36–37).
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146. Pagels, Elaine, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), chap. 3.Google Scholar
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150. Ibid., pp. 144,145 citing Helene Foley.
151. Ibid., pp. 151,149.
152. Ibid., p. 150.
153. Ibid., p. 145.
154. Ibid., p. 149.
155. Ibid., p. 151. Virginia Burrus has astutely noted in a recent paper that the speeches given by the male symposiasts in Plato' dialogue are also “made up”; the male figures are no more “solid” and have no moreclaim to a male subjectivity than does the representation of Diotima (“Is There a Woman in the Text? Reflections on Doing ‘Women's History’ in the Field of Late Antiquity,” conference on “Religion and Gender in the Ancient Mediterranean,” Ohio State University, 05 22, 1997, typescript, pp. 4–5).Google Scholar
156. In Off With Her Head! The Denial of Women's Identity in Myth, Religion, and Culture, ed. Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard and Doniger, Wendy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 165–184; discussion at p. 180, citing Claudia Camp and Raphael Patai. Gregory of Nyssa, on the other hand, in commenting on Proverbs 4:6–8 does not flinch from stating that both men and women can be married to Wisdom, citing Galatians 3:28 for support: De virginitate 20 (SC 199, 500, 502).Google Scholar
157. Ibid., pp. 173–74,177.
158. Ibid., p. 180.
159. See Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Displacement and the Discourse of Women,” in Displacement: Derrida and After, ed. Krupnick, Mark (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 190, for a critique of Derrida on this point, after a sympathetic (and useful) review of Derrida's advancement of feminine figurations.Google ScholarArnaldo Momigliano accepts the role of Macrina in the Vita and De anima et resurrectione at face value: “Macrina is hereSocrates to her brother Gregory” (“The Life of St. Macrina by Gregory of Nyssa,” in Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews, and Christians [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987], p. 208;Google Scholar the essay was originally printed in The Craft of the Ancient Historian: Essays in Honor of Chester G. Starr [New York, 1985], pp. 443–58).Google Scholar
160. Brown, Peter, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 153, borrowing a phrase from Claude Lévi-Strauss.Google Scholar
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164. Ibid. (PG 46, 85).
165. Ibid. (PG 46,148–49).
166. Gregory of Nyssa, De opificio hominis 1 (PG 44,128,129,131).Google Scholar
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168. Ibid., 16 (PG 44, 177, 180); Gregory faults the notion as too “lowly” for the Christian affirmation of human creation.Google Scholar
169. Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio catechetica magna 8 (Jaeger 3.4, 30); De virginitate 13 (SC 119, 422).Google Scholar
170. Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio catechetica magna 31 (Jaeger 3.4, 76–77); De opificio hominis 16 (PG 44, 185); cf. the arguments of Gregory's Contra fatum (PG 34, 145–74). Gregory's critique of determinism is explored in David Amand (de Mendieta), Fatalisme et liberté dans I'antiquité grecque (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l'Université, 1945), Book II, chap. 9.Google Scholar
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173. Gregory of Nyssa, De opificio hominis 16 (PG 44, 181, 185). Note Verna Harrison's summation: “Gregory argues that there is no gender in the eternal Godhead since even within the human condition gender is something temporary” (“Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,” Journal of Theological Studies 41 [1990]: 441).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
174. Ibid., 22 (PG 44, 204).
175. Ibid., 16 (PG 44,185).
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177. Gregory of Nyssa, De opificio hominis 18 (PG 44,196).Google Scholar
178. Gregory of Nyssa, Hom, in Canticum Canticorum 4 (Jaeger 6,115).Google Scholar
179. Ibid., 9 (Jaeger 6,275–76).
180. Gregory of Nyssa, Vita Macrinae 1 (SC 178,140).Google Scholar
181. Harrison, Verna E. F. notes how Gregory also can allow “Wisdom” to change genders in his First Homily on the Song of Songs (“Gender Reversal in Gregory of Nyssa's First Homily on the Song of Songs,” Studia Patristica 27 [Leuven: Peeters, 1993], pp. 35–36).Google Scholar
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183. Ibid., 1 (SC 178,140,142).
184. See Clark, Elizabeth A., “Sex, Shame, and Rhetoric: Engendering Early Christian Ethics,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59 (1992): 221–45, esp. 230–35, for examples.Google Scholar
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187. Burrus, , “Is There a Woman in the Text?” typescript, p. 7. For a different construal of the problem, see Bernadette Brooten, “Early Christian Women and Their Cultural Context: Issues of Method in Historical Reflection,” in Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, ed. Collins, Adela Yarbro (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985), p. 66: “The lack of sources on women is part of the history of women.”Google Scholar