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Jennifer Barry, "Gender Violence in Late Antiquity: Male Fantasies and the Christian Imagination" (U California Press, 2025)
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- [00:01]
Mike Motilla
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient yout Review. I'm Mike Motilla and today we're talking with Jennifer Berry about gender violence, male fantasy and the Christian imagination. In 1980, Gayle Rubin wrote that the time has come to talk about sex. Rubin admitted that sometimes sex and gender can feel frivolous. That compared to nuclear annihilation or crushing poverty and systemic racism, they can feel petty. But like racism, Rubin argued, gender has its own logic, it has its own hierarchies and its own forms of violence. And these aren't just downstream of economics or race or electoral politics or even religious fighting. Rubin's point was that if you don't get how sex and gender work, then you don't really get the society. Of course, all those other things matter. But looking around at culture wars, even today, it's not hard to see that being a man has a certain kind of force to it that isn't reducible to money. Or say that differently. Like there's a lot of rich guys who feel threatened by shifting gender norms and economics and religion and taste too. They can play into ideas around the ideal woman. And that ideal has its own gravitational pull. And Rubin's point was that the ways people suffer and the pains they endure, that too is gendered. And Jennifer Berry argues that it's time to talk about the world of gender violence in early Christianity. Professor Berry has written a difficult book. It's not difficult in the sense that it's hard to understand, but it's difficult as in it makes readers look at some pretty painful stuff, stuff that people sometimes turn to Rome to avoid. But she asks us to look at it because that pain and that violence is the stuff of late antiquity. And so this is what Sarah Ahmed calls a killjoy book. And honestly, it might not be a podcast to have on with kids in the car and it might be difficult to listen to as an adult. It's a book about gender violence, which was at least as prevalent and as constitutive in ancient Rome as it is today. Or to say that differently, Rome, it can conjure up epics and stories of battles or maybe riots more than the more common but not less traumatic stories of rape and abuse. And people felt that gender based violence on their bodies and in their memories as viscerally as they did any reference to Homer or Tacitus. But all too often that gender based violence, it falls away from history. And my sense, and Dr. Berry can correct this, is that a lot of that Passing over of gender violence happens not exactly through denial, but through something more like disavowal, where scholars today will absolutely see the gender violence in their texts. And then they'll say something like, you know, wow, the depiction of women here is awful, but. And then they get onto their real point. Or maybe when we're teaching, we don't assign a certain text because the violence in it is just too painful and we can't, or we don't want to bring that into class. And often for good reasons. But Barry's scholarship teaches us that this violence is more than awful. It's certainly not less than awful. But we actually learn stuff about this world by understanding its gender violence, violence, what it was, what assumptions it reveals, what forms of pain were speakable to people in late antiquity. So, yes, gender violence is about as old as human history. Men worry women will laugh at them, women worry men will kill them. But it's simply not the case that gender violence was just bad, as in a kind of self contained constant variable that we can keep to the side because it's always been there and has obvious predictable consequences. Barry shows us that gender violence was a real force in history, that it did things, like things more than one thing. And it takes some analysis to understand its ramifications, the relationships it built, the affects that it circulated, the habits and the stories and the tendencies that it made normal. The subtitle of this book is about male fantasies. And sometimes my mind will automatically go to psychoanalysis when I hear fantasy. So fantasy, not as, like know, fake, but it's a kind of unconscious, predictive text that we make to cohere or to make meaning out of the blooming, buzzing confusion of our world. But Barry takes us a step further, and the book is kind of less interested in that, in what the desires are than what they do, the kind of atmospheres they create, the heroes they legitimate, the forms of harm they render invisible, or the questions that make obvious the fears that become so all encompassing that they become that problem with no name. This gender violence, Barry shows was everywhere, and it filled bodies in early Christian imaginations and is still with us today. And we are lucky that Professor Barry is here to talk with us. So, Jenny, hi, thank you for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you? How'd you come to write this book?
- [04:55]
Jennifer Berry
Well, hi, I am Jennifer Berry, and first of all, thank you so much for being such a careful and close reader and really kind of drawing out some of the more central and important interventions of this book. But as far as I'M concerned.
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I am a historian of early Christianity.
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With a specific focus on this kind of all encompassing category called late antiquity. But my special focus has often been on Jewish gender and of course, gender violence and historiographical interventions. And this thread of research really began, I think it built out of my earlier research, my first book, it's called Bishops in Flight, and that was published in 2019, where I started to recognize and see these episodes of gender violence.
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That had not really been pulled to.
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I think, pulled to the fore in a satisfying way. I'd always been kind of interested in gender studies. I'd been very fortunate throughout my career, or at least in my academic development, to have been influenced by phenomenal feminist scholars from Elizabeth Clark, Jeremy Masters to Virginia Burris and Melody Johnson debaubery during my graduate work. So I'd always been paying attention to these details because I'd been given the tools and the resources by these foundational voices to start paying attention to gender and sexuality and the problem of women's history within this field I was being trained in. But I was dissatisfied, mated with, especially after 2017, once we are in the throes of the MeToo movement, not having.
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A book about gender violence that I.
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Could kind of reference or know how to deal with, especially when I started entering into the classroom, knowing how to deal with the realities of sexual violence, gender violence, domestic violence that are everywhere in the text that I teach. And so this, this book is really kind of a response to that. That gap that I. Or that book that I wanted and the resources I needed to learn how to deal with this really tricky topic.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, thank you for that. So let me start with page one, and I'm going to quote you back to yourself. I know this is. This is terrible, but you write this book directly challenges the way contemporary scholarship continues to promote foundational Christian texts and theological arguments that normalize gender based violence. Such practices have ongoing consequences that shape the way the past is appropriated into the present. And while focus on gender and violence has begun to alter and challenge traditional readings of early Christian texts, many of these pathbreaking scholars and their work are relegated to special topics or dismissed altogether. So you don't need to name names. Exactly. But before we see kind of how you challenge this, can you tell us a little bit about what it looks like to promote foundational Christian texts and theological arguments that normalize gender based violence? What's the bad thing that you're pushing to guess here?
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Jennifer Berry
I have often had conversations with other feminist scholars within the field of in Ancient studies. And we have all kind of come to the conclusions that whenever we present.
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Papers, we get relegated to kind of.
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These special topics panels or we get.
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Ordered and in women's and gender, you.
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Know, sections or there are special issues, but it's a special issue because it is all focused on kind of gender and sexuality or violence, as if it's somehow separate.
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My.
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My advisor had this kind of description of how someone had really maligned her work as kind of window dressing to the field of late antiquity. And that's what kind of stoked some of those, you know, fires in me to start thinking, oh, how often are we just kind of pigeonholed? As if these are topics or ideas that aren't central to these figures that we study and that they are continuously kind of relegated to the sidelines when, as I point out throughout the book, they're everywhere. I mean, it's baked into these texts in a way that is often just kind of bypassed or as we'll kind of discuss and go along, kind of dismissed altogether.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like. Like you said, like what. Once you see it, it's really hard to unsee. And I mean, I think this is a book that just asks people to sit with it for long enough that you. You won't unsee it again or so anyways. So that's the bad version to do this. But I think one of the reasons why some of this is done so poorly is that it's hard to get at female subjectivity in antiquity. And that's not an excuse, but it is me asking you, what are the models you actually looked for and how did you find yourself doing it? How do you actually, as a historian, try to hear and imagine these women and this violence at this time period?
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Jennifer Berry
Yeah. So this is where my training in women's and gender studies, I have hold two certificates from both Duke and from Drew. And I have a long history of having kind of the training and the tools to think about intervention work.
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Right.
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So feminist historiaggery, historiography, womanist theology, and then some other theoretical framing that I use in this book were absolutely credited to that type of background. Background. And a lot of it began in seminars with Elizabeth Clark where she kind of said, look, these texts that we deal with are not the annals. Right, that the modern historian has access to.
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Right.
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They're highly theological and literary in nature. But isn't that great? Because that means we can use theory, particularly literary theory, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, to think alongside these texts now to find the gaps the fissures, the moments of pause that allow maybe female subjectivity, not as it actually happened, or recoverable female figures that we can kind of holistically pull out of history and then kind of reconstruct, but maybe through different methods we can get at female subjectivity. And that's where Virginia Burris work and influence has played a central role in how I've approached at least the concept of post positivist feminist history, which is not recovering the lost voices as they are actually preserved, but asking, well, how does power silence them? And what. What then do those silences tell us? Yeah, so that's, that's, I think, the way in which I'm using different literary kind of constructions and literary theoretical investments and, and ways of looking at the past that, that lend themselves really well to the types of texts that we have.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's great. You know, the subtitle of this book is Male Fantasies in the Christian Imagination. And I think fantasy is kind of the tricky word here. I'm sure all of them require lots of analysis. But, like, what does fantasy actually mean to you or for this book?
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Jennifer Berry
Yes. So I love that you brought up psychoanalysis at the very beginning because I, I kind of intentionally use fantasy as a way to kind of draw people in, but kind of trick them because it's not a psychoanalysis.
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Right.
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Like, I'm not interested in a Freudian assessment of these male thinkers.
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Right.
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There's plenty of people who do that.
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Type of work, and some feminists have.
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Done some really incredible kind of play and interventions. But I am more interested in the consequences of fantasy more as a genre.
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Right.
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Almost a pre genre to fantasy, where we're looking at.
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How men are writing.
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Their visions of female subjectivity, female violence, or gendered bodies in particular, that do not conform to idolized male bodies and how they're trying to control that narrative.
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Right.
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Because it's a. It's an intentional writing practice that, that takes place. So fantasy there is really meant to, to one, relocate what we think of as fantasy, especially in an ancient context.
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And then what does it do?
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And that's where I'm kind of relying on different literary techniques in the ancient world, such as, you know, like Greek novels tied with dream theory, to come up with this working definition of fantasy, especially when it's tied to hagiographies.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And we'll get into both Greek novels and kind of dream sequences and that kind of stuff. That's going to be fun. But maybe one of the hopeful ways into the mythological stuff is just to jump into some examples. The book opens with a study on how the Bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, tells the story of this kind of text of terror from judges 19. Can you tell us the Bible version of the story? And then what does Athanasius want with it?
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Jennifer Berry
Yeah, for sure. So for the first couple chapters, I really wanted to trace a larger discourse of gender violence and where can we look at different models of that? And of course, biblical studies has been foundational for thinking about ways to creatively engage these stories. But one of the most troubling ones for feminist biblical scholars in particular has always been judges 19, which is about the Levites concubine who is brutally raped, gang raped, and then is dismembered by the Levite and her pieces of her body are sent across to the different tribes to kind of bring about a call to arms. Now Athanasius, like many of the church fathers, are interested in using biblical stories.
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To make a point.
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And Judges 19 was picked up by Athanasius at a peculiar moment in his exilic journey to be used as an example of his suffering.
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Right?
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So he opens his story with the judges 19 narrative, but then he goes on to make a comparison to his own suffering and stating that, wow, this judges 19 character, this woman who was never named, right, who has this horrific experience, while that's bad, it's not anywhere near as bad as the suffering he's going through. And so he turns women's suffering really into an allegory for his own experience, which of course teaches us that scripture is really mobilized to kind of reinforce power, erase victims, and really redirect the horror into it kind of on A theological point.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah. And we see a similar kind of like, flattening wall kind of broadening out into theology with Augustine, too. And you track in the next chapter the way that Augustine kind of anonymizes women or kind of turns them into types that he can then stamp on his argument with. Right. So he'll kind of stamp out their subjectivity and then put his own stamp of kind of the theology on top of them. And so the women in these stories, they're kind of necessary for the argument, and then they get disappeared at the same time. And I don't think that your point there is like, that people should feel bad about this. Maybe we should. But you don't need a book to tell you to feel bad about something like that. It's about an inability to take gender or violence or gender violence as a meaningful input in a theological system. Right. Like, it just doesn't shape his world. It's something he can kind of jump right over because he has an answer for everything in the kind of bigger picture theology that he's doing. But can you kind of tell us about the way that Augustine ends up doing this erasing or flattening of women in his kind of theological project?
- [19:58]
Jennifer Berry
Yeah, absolutely. So Augustine does this throughout his works, but famously, in two sections that I've zeroed in and are one through his confessions, where he engages his mother Monica, and really kind of uses her as a talking point to, in a troubling manner, really justify domestic violence and abuse. And there's a couple of ways in which he does that in that text. But then I kind of build on the momentum that this is not something that's isolated. He also does this type of flattening, filling in of the logic of gender violence, especially sexual violence in the City of God, in that very first book where he's really taking a very sensitive topic, namely where the sack of Rome happened. Some dedicated virgins were raped during the course of that invasion.
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All right?
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And he's dealing with kind of the aftermath and the effects of that. Now, what stood out to me was not just the reading of that passage that's so jarring, but the ways in which that that text had been taught. To me, as this was a moment where Augustine was being sympathetic to survivors of sexual violence, I. And it. The closer I read the text and the more I looked at the examples that were in the text itself, I could not come to the same conclusion.
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Right.
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That these, these. These figures were being treated fairly or with care. And I think he did that in a Couple different ways. And I pull out, especially in that chapter, the ways in which he uses named figures and unnamed figures to kind of accent certain parts of his logic. So he begins with a story of Lucretia, who's not a Christian, who is kind of a foundational figure within Roman history as this example of female chastity within Roman kind of ideals of a matronly Roman woman. And she, of course, is famously raped and then subsequently to kind of ensure that her legacy is determined to be a pure one, that she had no part in this experience of sexual violence and that she was always dedicated to her husband, she kills herself, Right? And she's. She is exalted for that.
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Right?
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But Augustine uses her story as a way to start to question women's experiences, women's stories. He says, can we really trust Lucretia because she decides to kill herself? Was that really maybe the consequence of her giving in to the sexual encounter? Can we really say that she was ultimately innocent? Now, he won't go one way or another, but the reader is given kind of that wink, wink, nod, nod that maybe she's not an. An ideal model to work with. Because when we go back to the stories of the women who were sexually assaulted, there were a few who had preemptively killed themselves, right? To avoid being sexually assaulted. And Augustine will use Lucretia story to say that these women should not be remembered as martyrs, right? In fact, we might, like we are questioning Lucretia's story, we might question why they would even consider self murder, right? And that then causes us to think, oh, wait, can we even trust any of these women? And he will go on to say, well, maybe even the ones that decided not to kill themselves, that were sexually assaulted, maybe those dedicated virgins were being punished by God, right? Because we can never truly know the internal will of women. We cannot know the internal will of anyone, but especially women is kind of where we're being drawn to. And I was completely shocked that I had not been taught this story in this way at all. And that. That sounded also still too familiar, right? Anytime we hear stories of sexual assault survivors, especially in the media, in this kind of MeToo moment, it's the survivors who are continuously interrogated, right? It's not that we are assuming that their story is true, and that's why we have this kind of powerful rhetoric of trust survivor, you know, truck survivors, but no one really does. And so it was just that one more example of like, oh, look, look how things have not really changed in how we're approaching this intense topic.
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Right.
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That there's a real effect happening here, that there's a collapse of real pain into kind of a universal questioning of female voices and their experiences. And it really kind of blurs the victim, perpetrator boundaries in troubling ways and has really modern echoes that continue to. To haunt us.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the idea that. I mean, there's the. I mean, kind of trust women point that comes through really clearly in the chapter. And. But the other point there is that there is like a. There's a seduction too, like, abstracting out to the theological that the way. The way you put it was, you know, were initially presented with violated women, but ultimately they were lost among the multitude of sinners guilty of sin that, like, being able to just kind of pull out and say, like, okay, yeah, you know, like, you know, like, all people are sinners and get enjoyments out of things that hurt them. And so, you know, maybe that's what's going on here too, is that, like, you know, like, if. If people enjoy things that are bad for them, like, maybe these women also, like, thought that and, and, and. And there's something like, I don't know, like, fake smart about that or like, like, there's like a. Like. Oh, yeah, maybe that's. That's right. That, like, I don't know, like, once you kind of push on the details a little bit, you see, like, oh, there's, like. That's working at such a level of abstraction that it's not actually paying any attention to what's going on in the story. And the inability to think about that story kind of theologically, I think, is an important part of the intervention that you're making there.
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Jennifer Berry
Right. There's something that's baked into this type of theological logic and the dismissal of women's stories and of these stories. Absolutely.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah. Yeah. The fact that he can't really go there is telling. Yeah. All right, so enough with Augustine. A little bit after Augustine, there's all these debates breaking out about Mary and question about perpetual virginity. Um, and can. Can you tell us about kind of how those debates play into the. The broader study that you have here of kind of gendered violence?
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Jennifer Berry
Yeah, yeah. I kind of end with Jesus's mom, because I wanted to emphasize that not even Mary gets a pass.
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Right.
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In these. These stories. So Mary is both an ideal and an impossible model, which will be kind of helpful, especially when we start thinking about saints and the example that they. They provide.
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Right.
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So the virginity debates in about the 4th and 5th century, really reframe women's bodies as kind of a battleground for Christian orthodoxy is what I wanted to kind of emphasize in that narrative. And I wanted also to kind of highlight that gender violence is really embedded in those theological arguments in ways that we could see in some of Augustine, that we could see in some of Athanasius. But this is really where whether Mary remained intact really becomes a proxy for control of all women's bodies in a way that will be replicated in many ways. And so I look at him particular not just to kind of this tipping point within late antiquity, but what are some of the precursors and some of the traditions that are associated with that. And a. Famously, in the protein gallium of James, Mary is tested for to prove that she's a virgin when she is impregnated with. With Jesus. And it's a very violent set of tests. One, she has to drink water, like this, poisoned water. She comes clean. But the other episode or the other test is after she's given birth, you know, she's violently, almost assaulted by a midwife to check, you know, and to make sure that she's still a virgin. I mean, this is. If anybody has read that episode. It's. It's kind of humorous in some ways, the way it's been characterized, because the midwife's hand famously is caught on fire. Okay. So there's some sort of divine consequence for doing this, but the fact that she. He is touching Mary's body, one that had already gone through, you know, presumably a pretty painful birth in a cave, is not talked about enough. Right. And I. So I kind of use this example as a way to think about not even the mother of God.
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Right.
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This theological emblem of, you know, feminine chastity and intactness escapes this type of interrogation, this type of violation.
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Right.
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And in the fantasy or the imaginations of these early Christian authors.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the second half of the book, it turns to genre or to kind of like storylines that stick in people's heads, not because they mimic reality exactly, but because the stories themselves take on a kind of tendency of their own. So you hear one of the two of these stories, and they. You start to kind of see it in the world. Like you. I don't know, you go see a detective movie and the world looks like clues. And you start us off with dreams, though. And again, this is not like dreams and Freud. This is more like the way we talk about dreams. Like a dream sequence in a movie where you kind of know what to expect. At least so why dreams? And what do ancient dreams help us see in these texts? You talk a lot about Jerome, so maybe you could tell about Jerome's visions.
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Jennifer Berry
And I'm really doing the heavy hitters here. This is where Patricia Coxmiller's work on dreams and lead antiquity was very, very helpful for thinking about, well, what are these ancient writers up to? And how can I really begin to theorize how fantasy is functioning? And that's where classical dream theory became kind of the way in to thinking, well, how are they. How are they constructing holy lives, specifically holy lives that are tied to these experience of gender violence. And I saw that dreams in particular are functional in the ways that they control.
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Right.
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And Jerome is famously for using dreams as a way to order his narratives and think about hidden knowledge being revealed. And usually that hidden knowledge is divine knowledge. Right. That's authorizing him in a way to. To make a statement, a truth statement, in other words. And that is, it's one way to kind of frame how I'm. I'm now applying not only the discourse of gender violence that's prevalent in and seems to be all over the place in all of these other texts that I kind of draw on in the first three chapters, but now applying it specifically to the genre of hagiography.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. And one of the other kind of themes that come out in these hagiographies is revenge fantasies. And to get at that, you make this contrast between two different monks. One is Simeon, this guy who lives on a pillar, and Assyria and Synclitica, who's out in the Egyptian desert. And both of them are living these extreme lives. Worms play a big part in both of their stories. But kind of when you make the contrast, you say that there's a kind of like, revenge fantasy that is going to play out in Syncliticus story. So can you, like, give us the contrast and then tell us about these fantasies?
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Jennifer Berry
Yeah, yeah. So that's where I really wanted to access why gender is so important to pay attention to. Because men and women are not treated equally in hagiographies. Gender violence is very particular, and it functions in recognized, recognizable patterns.
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Right.
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So even when Simeon, who is a masculine body that's being presented ultimately in the narrative, the start of his story of suffering, especially with worms, begins when he's lying, prostate prostrate, like on the ground. And all of the. The terminology that's associated with this kind of imagery of when his body is being attacked by worms is tied to birthing narratives, female imagery, the entrance of sin through a woman. And there his kind of authority and authenticity as a true Christian is really questioned. And that's contrasted significantly when worms attack his body when he's up on his pole, famously. So, you know, and worms are also present there. But these worms, while he's standing erect and kind of in this authoritative position, masculine position and masculine body, the worms become kind of symbols and examples of kind of his heroic endurance and a symbol of the type of truth that he proclaims. Right? So even when worms kind of drop off his body, they turn into little pearls that then really spread the message, Christianity, change minds, hearts, etc. And so I begin with that hagiarchy in order to really emphasize how drastic and how different it is. When we have a. A clear hagiarchy about a female saint who is gendered from the very beginning as female. And the moment we see the worms come and attack her body, it again highlights some of the questions associated with her. Because even before we get to. To her life, the. The narration of her life, we have tons and tons of material of her teaching kind of to her community. She's wise, she's thoughtful, she's humble, and she has this voice of authority. But when we get to the actual hagia hagiography section, somebody else is writing her story. That authority slowly kind of un. Becomes undone through this storyline of it of worms or other diseases attacking her.
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Her body.
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And they're not just attacking her, you know, in like, overall, but they're attacking her mouth. I just thought that was such an interesting way to start thinking about. Look, there's something here in this construction, in this even mini hagiary, that emphasizes women's suffering as. And seeing it almost as it's deserved. And that seems to be contrasted significantly with the ways in which Simeon's body, especially when it's in its erect form, is his suffering, is glorified and even kind of strengthens him, whereas this story ultimately kills the saint. And I thought, well, that might be a way to set up a conversation to talk about how hagiographers are using familiar tropes, right, that are traceable to other texts that we had already explored, using those tropes to start to construct holiness in very complicated and gendered ways. Which leads us then into kind of the romance narrative later.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell us about the bad romance.
- [37:27]
Jennifer Berry
Yeah. So with these next set of texts, I really wanted to call attention to some of the more pressing and troubling conclusions of hagiography and what kind of work it can do. So I begin by using kind of ancient novels to point out there's something familiar here. We can make some gestures to these other hagiar fees about women's lives and pick up maybe on some of the more violent details that are often hidden because we're. When we see haggy garpies, we think only Christian holiness, right? But if we are able to put it into different conversation partners, maybe some of those other details will kind of stand out a bit more. So ancient novels, the good romance always ends in a reunion with virginity intact and then kind of culminates with the wedding and a conjugal kind of marriage and experience that finally satisfies some of the longing throughout now within the saints lives. These are kind of, as Judith Perkins kind of pointed out, these are warped versions. There are love stories where women can only win through death or renunciation or perpetual virginity. So for example, Millennia's, the Lego Millennia twists the romance genre where she begins by rejecting marriage because that's not what she wants, but because she's a woman and she's a good woman, she submits to the desires of her father and of course her husband. And she has to go through this really violent experience of marital rape. I mean, and that's, that's not what other scholars have noted is happening in this text. And that's what I really want to kind of highlight that she is very clear that she does not want to get married, she does not want to have children, and she definitely does not want to have sex. And yet she has to submit over and over again in order to achieve the, the expectations of kind of a Roman marriage would be children. And that's where I'm, I'm pulling in kind of the genre of an ancient novel as being inverted, but also highlighting the, the gender violence that's taking place. Because ultimately we're being taught right in this narrative. We are, we're looking to the saints to look for models of, of holiness. And what Malenia is teaching us is that these two men get it wrong at first, right. Her dad and then her husband are getting, getting it wrong. They're not listening to what God wants, not really what Melania wants. That's not, not what matters here, but what God wants. And so she has to suffer in order for them to finally understand that her role as a Christian ascetic, as a, a holy woman is really what needs to take precedence. Because in order to kind of eventually get through that suffering, those experiences of marital rape and two unwanted pregnancies. And it's pretty clear in the text these are not wanted pregnancies. They. She eventually loses the two children, but it's only through that whole experience of going through two unwanted pregnancies and two pregnancies then that result in child death that they finally get it. But it is this whole storyline that's built off of suffering that. Because they don't understand that her true desires were to be married to, not her husband, but to the true bridegroom, that is, of course, Christ. But holiness for women in particular has. Is. Is grounded in this type of gendered suffering that is frequently just kind of cast as, oh, well, that's one part of her story. Right. Rather than saying, no, this is not just one part, but it's foundational and it's a requirement in order to kind of get to holiness.
- [41:42]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you see there how the good romance story kind of like locks in, and so the rest of it is like a privation on it or something or a twisting of that good story where the kind of expectation is like, no, no, no, this is going to work out. This is going to be great. You know, like, this is. This is the way life is supposed to be. And you just see over and over again that, like, no, like, that's not really what's happening here. And it's. And it just kind of shifts and shifts and shifts. And I mean, the next chapter ends up kind of going even further than this. And you kind of read Mary of Egypt as a kind of ancient horror story. By the end of this chapter, I was thinking of the substance and Mary of Egypt, this character that's just kind of totally twisted beyond recognition, but is also being twisted by the desires that are out there in the world. Anyways, but anyways, can you kind of tell us about. There's this kind of long history that you're pulling on in that chapter about feminist scholarship around horror and horror films. Can you tell us a little bit about that and kind of then how it helps you read the story of Mary of Egypt?
- [42:56]
Jennifer Berry
Yeah, so those last two chapters in particular, Dreaming Mothers and then Nightmares of the Fathers, that really are my way of saying, look, it's not enough to. To kind of recognize these. But you. I want to do something with these texts too, that I don't want to just point out the dangers of this scholarship or the consequences of this type of erasure of women's experiences. But I. I have a pedagogical interest as well. And because I am teaching these texts and these texts still function as important parts of the lived experiences for some faith communities. And so I wanted to provide readers with the tools and the methods available to us that can help us read against the text. And so Mary of Egypt really became such a powerful story for me to start thinking about how survivors can read back against the text, read back against the violence, while. While not letting go of that violent experience, but finding ways to intervene in productive ways. So Mary of Egypt is a fascinating story because it's so weird. Like, it's such a. It's just a peculiar story that kind of stands out among the Christian hagiographies because it all begins with a monk who's kind of dissatisfied with his experience. He's not challenged enough. And so he kind of roams into the desert a little bit further and kind of encounters some other men. And they kind of all kind of get together and say, oh, well, let's challenge ourselves. And during Lent, let's go even deeper into the desert in order to kind of perfect ourselves further. And so Zazan is kind of goes into the desert and he encounters this phantom, right? There's this figure that's blackened by the sun that seems to be running in a very empty desert. And it terrifies him. And that terror is what really stood out to me because he's not scared and runs away. He's scared, and he's drawn more towards this figure. And that's where I found feminist horror eerie in particular. So Barbara Creed is kind of the. The foundational figure I deal with here as a way to start thinking about what can. What can I do with this encounter that emphasizes that the ways in which women can be scary and that these stories of violence can have kind of these interventional moments where horror can reflect back on the reader in a way that challenges them. And so this is where I was thinking about how horror frames through objection. Kind of monstrous femininity in particular, and survival. These themes really help kind of yield a reading that reveals male fantasies about controlling the unruly female desire, but. But not being successful, right? And they. They're trying to. But ultimately Zosimus gets down on his knees, right? And he's flooded with fear and tears in several episodes. And eventually kind of trusts that maybe she's not a demonic figure, but maybe she is a holy figure, right? But he requires a story from her. He demands her story, right? And she frequently, like, what are you. Why are you looking on a sinful woman? You know, and why are you desiring to see a sinful woman? And not only see, but to hear this story? And then she relates back to Him. A very kind of compelling narrative of her own journey as a perpetual, you know, a. A perpetrator of sexual violence. She was sexually ferocious in her younger years. And there she even describes corrupting an entire boat of men, attacking them with her sexual desire and corrupting them. I mean, and it's not until she runs into the Virgin Mary that she has this kind of transformative moment. So she herself, as this kind of monstrous figure, someone who perpetuates sexual violence and then becomes kind of a scary figure, kind of undoes some of the maybe things that we might expect in a Christian hagiography. But if we have the language of kind of monstrous femininity to do that work, we start to maybe think about alternate ways to read this text that might feel more empowering for survivors, in particular on how to queer the text in a way that is very productive and maybe more pedagogically beneficial if taught in this. In this way.
- [48:20]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, I mean, there's a way of reading that text. It's about, like, sin and its consequences that, That I, you know, I'm sure plenty of people have read and have gotten a lot out of it that way, but, like, reading kind of how the monstrous and the fear that the. Like that, like, it's. It's weird, but it's also like, it's a little scary. Like. Like the. And I. I think I hadn't quite thought of the story like that until reading the chapter and then just like, actually trying to picture it and realizing, like, yeah, like, he would have been freaked out. And the way she tells the story, he should be, and letting yourself be gripped by that fear, I think is kind of part of the power of what makes that story work. Anyway, so you've given us a couple different modes of reading here and kind of things to look for. But at the end of the book, you suggest some. Some ways forward. Like what? I don't know. What. What do you want people to do? Like, what are those ways forward? What do you hope people take from the book?
- [49:30]
Jennifer Berry
Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately I really want people to re. Rethink these foundational texts and the methodologies that don't compartmentalize gender violence anymore. And students and journal readers in particular, I'm interested in seeing kind of are helping them see the continuities between ancient and modern ways to normalize violence. That. That this kind of familiar link is done in recognizable ways and patterns. And if we are able to recognize those, then we have tools to disrupt it. So the larger takeaway really is if we don't reckon with how these texts shape Christian imaginations.
- [50:11]
Right.
- [50:12]
We risk replicating their silences and excuses. And I think it's time to stop using those excuses.
- [50:20]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. Great. Okay. Always our last question. What's next? What are you working on now?
- [50:26]
Jennifer Berry
So these areas of interest are not going away, because, again, once you start seeing things, you can't unsee it. So I have two projects that I'm working on at the moment. The first is another monograph called. Called Scandalous Christian History. And this one's more about how ancient historians used scandal as a rhetorical tool. But there I'm pulling in gender as well as other kind of modes of scandal to think about how church historians are reconstructing the past. The second book is my first trade book, and it's called Tentative Terrifying Women in the Ancient World. And that's where I'm looking at bringing stories of empresses, rebels, martyrs to a much wider audience to do a reframing of kind of the rise of the Roman Empire.
- [51:22]
Mike Motilla
Cool. That sounds very exciting. Yeah. Come back and talk to us when those are out. All right. Jenny, thank you so much. This is fun. It's good to talk to you.
- [51:34]
Jennifer Berry
Yeah, it's good to talk to you, too. Thank you.