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Susan Ashbrook Harvey, "Ministries of Song: Women’s Voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity" (U California Press, 2025)
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Marshall Po
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
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Mike Motilla
Hello and welcome to New Books in Late Antiquity, presented by Ancient you Review. I'm Mike Motilla. Today we're talking with Susan Ashbur Carvey about Ministries of Song, Women's voices in Ancient Syriac Christianity. So much of history depends on where and what we look for. When we tell the story of Late Antiquity as a story of barbarians, it often becomes a story of military leaders. But it doesn't have to. There were children and women and grandparents in barbarian Caravans, too. When we tell the story of early Christian history as a story of sermons, it can become a story of bishops and councils. But anyone who's been to church knows that what the preacher says is often far less important than the music. And especially when we shift from what people knew to how they learned, we start to notice that it was choirs, and often choirs of women, who were the real Christian teachers in the 4th century. The poet and theologian Ephraim think like the. The Shakespeare of Syriac, when he was trying to defend Nicene Christianity. One of the things that he did was to train choirs of women to teach the faith. Or at least that's how his 6th century hagiographer imagined it. And it was easy to imagine that he did this because all over the ancient Mediterranean, there were choirs of women whose songs formed core memories and whose chanting crystallized community membership. To hear them, to sing along with them, to hum their tunes, and to repeat the words that they sang as you later went to work, that was what belonging to a church looked like. Jacob. That hagiographer even says that choirs of women singing loudly is the mark of a redeemed humanity. Those women, they sing loud, but they can be hard to see in our historical records. But Susan Astra Carvey has made them visible in her remarkable book, Ministries of Song. These choirs, they're hard to see because like so much of the work of women, they were local and consistent. It was faithful, dependable work that made church happen. And for the most part, because it was so normal, nobody wrote it down, except some Syriac texts did record it. There's a few canons, there's a few stories, there's some laws and a bunch of homilies, and enough detail that with Harvey's help, we can start to imagine our way back into a liturgy facilitated by choirs of women. And maybe with that little setup, we can start to see three big themes in this book. The first is that Syriac is not a fringe, but it is a large creative force in late antiquity. I think that's a lesson we're increasingly learning. The second is that liturgy can be evidence for social history. Partially, that's because a lot of life happened in church, yes, but it's also because what happens in a church is reflected. It's reflecting what happened in a wider world, and it may in turn have inflected what was happening in that wider world too. And the third I think broad theme in this book is that to get anywhere near the lived reality of the past, we're going to need to look for what women were doing another way of saying that is that we might not know exactly who any of these women were. We don't know their names. We don't know really what notes they were saying. But if we can know where they were and when they sang and how they were heard, then we can start to at least sketch the outlines of their social lives. We can begin to see them in churches and processions. Their voices echoed through streets and between homes. Their melodies taught Christians about God, humanity, sacred stories, and holy moments. People who listen to a podcast like this might be familiar with Harvey's previous book, Scenting Salvation, a book about smell in early Christianity. And in that book, Harvey asked us to move from reading words to picturing and listening and feeling our way back into late antiquity. And again with this book, we're invited to see Christian life not as a series of doctrines or stories or types, but of words made flesh. Doctrines, of course, did matter in antiquity, and authority did, too. But to win a theological contest often meant that people sang your songs and got used to your tropes and felt natural chanting your creeds. And those songs and those characters and those chants were often taught and led by women. Here to talk to us about those songs and those women is Susan Ashburg Carvey. Susan is Willard Prescott and Annie Maclean Smith, professor of History and Religion at Brown University. Susan, hi. Thank you so much for being here. Can you introduce yourself? Who are you? How'd you come to write this book?
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
Hi, Mike. Thank you for having me. And thank you for being interested in this book. And what a question. How does one arrive at a project?
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I started my career working in late antique asceticism because the diversity and creativity of that fascinated me, and also so did the paradoxes about embodiment in ancient ascetic texts. What seemed to be negative views of the body joined with a profound valuing of bodily experience and bodily knowledge. And that led to my work on the senses and especially smell. But working on smell and on scents and fragrances introduced me to the importance of liturgy as a context for how ancient Christians understood the body and its perceptions and experiences. I was pretty sure there was more to do there, and so I was looking for something in that direction and at the same time, specifically on the choirs. The women's choirs came into view with developments in Syriac studies in the late 20th century as we began to learn about and appreciate different kinds of poetry, liturgical poetry, hymns and sermons and prayers, and to see that it was important to understand different kinds of performances for these poetry, types of poetry. So at some Point I realized that women's choirs were sometimes singing hymns that imagined the voices of biblical women or women saints, that real women were singing the voices of imagined women from the sacred past in the first person. For example. This would be like singing a Christmas hymn that was set as the Virgin Mary's lullaby for her newborn baby Jesus. I didn't know why or how it was important that real women were singing these imagined women's voices, but I was sure there was something there and I stayed with it. Yeah.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, I'm glad you did, you know, so this is a book about choirs and women's choirs, and I don't want to get too caught up in this, but I've heard you describe this as an old fashioned book. Like, it's not a book about gender, it's a book about women. And you know. Yes, like when we say women or men, we know that kind of what we mean by that today is different than what it meant in late antiquity. And you know, there were people then, like now who don't fit into those categories. And those categories can't be understood without a lot of other forces involved. Class, race, sexuality, things like that. But I think, I don't know, sometimes our healthy fear of uncritically talking about women, it doesn't do the work that we hope it might do. It doesn't, I don't know, queer binaries and force historians to think harder about organizations of social life. Sometimes, as you put it, it just makes us talk more about men. So can you say something about gender or the problem of not talking about Women? Why in 2025 are you writing a book about women? Women?
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
In some ways, this is an old fashioned book because it is unashamedly about women. I often say I feel like a dinosaur doing this. A lot of people have told me over the years I've worked on this that this is no longer something we should do. We should be talking about gender or other things. So I felt like I was writing against a trend. I think that it's very important that late in the 20th century, historians realized what we often call the literary turn, that is, recognizing the degree to which our historical evidence was largely produced and transmitted by men, and very often distorted women's lives in the process. With that recognition, scholars often stopped writing about women and instead turned to very important issues of gender, gender fluidity or multiplicity, other kinds of social groups besides heteronormative models of marriage and children. And in that process of new ways of approaching history, I think there's been much misrepresentation and even occlusion of women's history. And I find it very distressing because it not only undervalues women in history, it overvalues the men and exaggerates their authority or control or impact. So if I can say, try to summarize this. I think we've seen two kinds of extremes for women's history. Either we see huge groups that are often essentialized, women as wives or mothers or widows, or we see huge groups that represent very few women, like empresses or noble women of great wealth, and how these elite women could exercise power or authority. But women in the past, like women now, had lives that were filled with many kinds of activities and skills and knowledge. They contributed to their communities in many ways, not just as mothers or wives, and not just as wealthy women or poor women. The choirs give us an example. Here's a contribution that women made. It's interesting. It was vibrant, and it falls outside the usual paradigms for women's lives that historians use, but it's telling us something important about women's history. Women did this, and it's worth looking at. Yeah.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah. Well, thank you. Okay, can we start, like, big picture, like, when listeners are picturing a choir of Syriac women.
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What should they be picturing? I know we don't know exactly who they were, but we have some sense of kind of where, when, why? How can you tell us about that?
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah, these were small choirs. Most of what I'm writing about would have been in a village or small town context. So in that instance, anything over two people counts as a choir, and maybe more often six to eight. But I don't have any statistics. That's based on one short reference from 1 6th century text. That sounds about right to me. These choirs were women who were consecrated virgins. That means that.
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They lived as single women, but not as nuns. They didn't marry, they weren't in that kind of social arrangement. And they were dedicated or consecrated to service of the church in its civic locations, that is, in towns or villages or the city. In Syriac, these consecrated virgins were often called Daughters of the Covenant. And they had a ministry. They did what bishops asked them to do.
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And a big part of that ministry was these choirs in the liturgy. These were not choirs of nuns. These were not choirs of deaconesses. Sometimes a choir director was a deaconess. But the sources about the Daughters of the Covenant tells us these were women who the local bishop would assign to practical work, like working in the women's hospital in the city of Edessa in the early 5th century. But the most important work that is emphasized over and over again in different canon law texts or in liturgical manuals was that from the time of the 4th century, Ephrem the Syrian, these women's choirs were assigned the task of singing in the liturgy. And their job was to sing.
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Particular kinds of hymns that were teaching hymns, we call them teaching songs, but also to lead the congregation in other parts of the responses. Refrains, alleluias, Amens.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. And the book is largely about, you know, Syriac women leading these congregations. And partly you're. You're choosing Syriac women because that's where a lot of the evidence remains. But there were choirs of women all over the Mediterranean world, Right. They're talking about, you know, illiterate, hardworking, somewhat talented, I'm guessing, right? Like, what do we know about the kind of broader context of singing women?
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
This is so important. There were choirs of women and girls in Greek, Roman, Egyptian religion as far back as we have evidence. And the Hebrew Bible has occasional references to women singing sacred songs. In the Roman Empire, as Christianity was beginning in the early century, there were choirs of girls and women attested for religious rituals all over the Mediterranean. And the exception is sometimes said to be Judaism, because women were not allowed to sing in the Jerusalem Temple. We simply do not know about the synagogues, which is, of course, where most Jews would have been gathered. But that's also not the only. So we literally don't know if women sang at or near synagogues. But that's also a very limited view of what counts as religious singing. So there's no question Jewish women were singing important devotional songs, for example, at weddings or at births or at funerals.
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So in the household, you know, religious singing was something that happened in more than one kind of space. And if Christians did not have women choirs, they would have basically been the only people in the whole Mediterranean world that didn't have them. But the other important thing we have to remember is that Christians did not have separate trained choirs until probably the fourth century, as Christianity was illegal during the first three Christian centuries. And churches were small. So you had congregational singing, and sometimes you had a special singer or chanter who led hymns or sang solo. It's not till the 4th century that we really get churches that are large enough to expand liturgy into multiple, more complicated roles or rituals, and that included expanding in grandeur and splendor, expanding with trained choirs. This is really the first time that we see trained choirs to sing particular parts of the liturgy. We see that all over The Mediterranean for Christian churches starting in the 4th century. And this is the moment, of course, when we begin to see women's choirs in Syriac. I think modern scholars did not expect to find women's choirs because there's a very famous passage in the New Testament by the apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 14, where Paul writes that women should keep silent in church. And that's a teaching that some churches still abide by and interpret in different ways, but certainly that included singing. So there was a scholarly habit that ancient Christian liturgies had choirs who were male, but our evidence shows otherwise.
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Mike Motilla
Right, right, right, right. So can you give us a sense of what's distinctive about Syriac Christian choirs? I know it's hard to know a ton about what was going on with all these choirs, but compared to, like Philo or Jerome, who talk about other choirs, can you tell us what was distinctive about Syriac Christians? Sorry, I should say philo is a 1st century Jewish writer from Alexandria, Jerome a Latin author from 4th, 5th century.
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
Right. So Philo writes about women's choirs. When he's describing probably a utopian imagining, a utopian community, we're not sure whether it really existed or not. An ascetic community he called the therapeuti in Egypt. And he describes that community having men and women who lived separately, but came together once a week and sang together. But as I say, it's part of this kind of utopian description. Jerome has a very extended description of the eschatological vision of women's choirs singing in the afterlife, in heaven, in his letter to Eustochium. Now, Jerome would have heard women's choirs in Jerusalem, where there were choirs of women ascetics and of male ascetics who.
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Sang the psalms, the biblical psalms, in the matins service before the main divine liturgy. But the Syriac women's choirs, first of all, were real. They weren't imagined or utopian or eschatological. They were right there. And they were located importantly in civic churches, that is not in convents where, of course, women sang because there wasn't anyone else there to sing, not in special communities that were set apart. We have important synodical rulings, I.e. early Syriac Canon law, that specify that every village, town and city church must have a women's choir to sing the teaching songs of the church. That role is specified not simply to sing the psalms from the Bible that the church inherited in its Bible, but to sing teaching songs, the songs, we call these in Syriac madroshe. These are songs that are unique to Syriac. Everybody has their own way of writing poetry, and this was a Syriac way.
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These were hymns that taught about the beliefs of the Church, that taught biblical stories, that taught how to live a Christian life. And. And in Syriac canon law and in liturgical handbooks starting in the early 5th century, we have the specific directions that these hymns should be sung by women's choirs. The men's choir should sing other things, but the women's choir should sing these teaching songs. So Greek and Latin churches also had choirs of women, and these seem to have been choirs of nuns or also of consecrated virgins. But it seems that they were restricted to singing the psalms from the Bible. There's no equivalent to the teaching songs of Syriac, the madroshe. We have something a little bit similar in Greek called the kontakion, but those were sung by male chanters. So this really is something specific to Syriac. And it's interesting.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. And I mean, I think listeners are gonna get a sense of it just from that answer. I do know that talking about sources makes for bad lectures and bad radio, but I think a little bit of talking about sources is going to be helpful to give people a sense of this book. I mean, there's just an incredible range of material that you kind of bring together to bring these choirs alive. I tried to make a brief list. We have the poetry of people like Ephraim and Jacob. We have the typica, or monastic rules, John of Ephesus stories, liturgical manuals, service books, canons from church councils, laws that require churches to pay these choirs. There's a ton of evidence that you're bringing together for us, But I don't know. You work on this book for a long time. When you think about the evidence for this book, what kind of evidence stands out for you and how did you think about organizing this?
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
I like to describe the evidence for this book as quantitatively thin, but qualitatively rich. We don't have a lot of evidence. We have a lot of scraps of tiny scraps of evidence. You know, half a sentence in a sermon that says, as we just heard the women sing, and then going on. So that. That's a piece of evidence right there. So what. What stands out to me most is the contrast between liturgical manuals, for example, which might not even mention the choirs, and canon law, which occasionally but repeatedly mentions them. And then the actual descriptions, again, not many, but there are several, literally only several substantial descriptions of what it was like to be in church and listen to these women's CHOIRS SING we have. I have, like, three of those that were from the sixth century and maybe a page or two long, but I had to, with those three, I had to, you know, fill out the picture from these tiny little fragments. I think of this as a mosaic built out of tesserae.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, the gaps between types of sources can also be really generative there maybe. Is that, like, the moment when you knew you had a book? I should ask, did you have a kind of, like, light bulb moment with this book where, like, all of a sudden you realize, like, there's this whole unit of social life that was everywhere but that nobody talks about or nobody knows about? I didn't know about it before you. So, like, did you have a kind of light bulb moment?
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah, I did, actually. I mean, it's funny to think of it in those terms, but at some point, I realized that if you were in a liturgy, if you were standing in church, you know, in the 6th century, in some Syriac church, women's voices were singing from three different distinct locations around the church space. So first, there were women's choirs who stood at the front.
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On the women's side. The men and women stood on different sides of the church. And so the women's choir were at the front and probably next to what was called the bema or.
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Something similar to a platform like a pulpit where the priest or bishop preached from. The women's choir was probably located right there. And then there would be the voices of imagined women from the Bible or saints, and stories which might have been. Would have been sung by the women's choirs, but also which would have been sung in the sermons by the priest or the bishop, because often sermons told stories that included dialogue and the person telling the story told that. And then there were the voices of the women in the congregation who were singing the refrains to the hymns or the responses, lord have mercy, Amen, alleluia. And, of course, so the women were singing in the laity all the way through the nave. So you had women at the front, women on both sides, women all around the church, there were voices of women. And I had never thought about liturgy as a place where, in fact, you were being surrounded by voices of women. And I thought that was astonishing.
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Mike Motilla
So we had this kind of surround sound women experience.
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And this is also a place where Christians are being educated. Like, this is where you, like, really learn about the faith, about kind of the kinds of things that you should believe and what it means to live a good Life. And I don't know, I guess most of the time when I think about education, especially in antiquity, I think of either holy men or women. And there are obvious examples of that. But most of the time these are like upper class people who have, you know, they speak like philosophers. But with these choirs, you give us, like a much wider range of people and a much wider way that they spoke or sang. Can you tell us about this kind of sung liturgical education?
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
So there's a big difference to what people often think of or experience if they go to church. In ancient liturgy and in many modern Orthodox churches, everything was sung from the opening invocation to the final benediction of the service. And these services, especially in antiquity, could go on for hours, several hours. Every single part of the liturgy was sung by someone. Deacons sang, clergy sang, choirs sang, male or female chanters, readers. When they read the Scriptures again, it was sung and the congregation sang. So you had chanters, choir clergy and congregation all singing in different patterns of dialogue or exchange. There were invocations, litany supplications, petitions, hymns, readings, responses, collective prayers, refrains, offerings, praise, rejoicing, gratitude. All of that was sung. And the Scripture and the sermons were chanted or intoned or cantillated. And a form of heightened speech, which, if not exactly a melody, like you might think of in a song, is a form of singsong meter that is much closer to singing than it is to reading. So the whole of liturgy was a form of heightened speech or song or melody in which every thing that needed to be said or asked or prayed for or offered was offered in some kind of melody. And liturgy was the location for religious education in the ancient world. That's where you learned, what did it mean that you were a Christian? Most people couldn't read. Most people didn't have books. So you learned your stories about the Bible from the Bible in the liturgy. You saw them in the way, in maybe in frescoes or in paintings in the church. You heard them in the hymns that were being sung and in the sermons that.
- [28:12]
You came, and you came there to learn what they meant, what they understood, what was doctrine, what did you believe as a Christian. All these things were taught in the liturgy in different ways. And in Syriac, that teaching was very often assigned to the particular parts of the liturgy that the women's choir sang together or sang with the congregation. The fact that liturgy was the place where this religious education took place, it carried a particular moral or ethical force in the community. These weren't singers sitting around the fireplace in the evening, let's sing, you know, the beloved folk songs of our past. This is a sacred space, the church building. These are sacred matters, the Bible. What is it that we really believe? What are our history? What are our stories? What are our beliefs? And women's choirs in Syriac were teaching you those matters in that space. So I think of it as a form of authoritative teaching. They weren't teaching what they thought they were teaching what was the collective.
- [29:28]
Knowledge and wisdom of the church as its whole. So I think of it as a pretty significant kind of teaching.
- [29:40]
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- [30:10]
Mike Motilla
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
We switched bodies. I am freaking out by now.
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Mike Motilla
I think I just peed a little. It's an absolute riot and the only movie that can be described as so.
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
Much weirder than the last time.
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Mike Motilla
What last time? It's the Frequel.
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
You ready?
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Mike Motilla
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The first big bucket of choirs must have been, I don't know, forgive me, but pretty average singers doing their best.
- [31:38]
Churches with three people in their. In their choirs like you. You have this, this great little detail of. Is it pseudo George of Ardula who Compares listening to the bad singing happening to being an Israelite held captive in Egypt. Like, we, we've all been there, but like, I mean, like, surely some of these singers were pretty talented and, and, and they were, were trained.
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
Right, right. What I find interesting is that essentially we have no discussion in the ancient texts about aesthetics as we might think of it. Like, oh, you're a really talented singer, why don' our choir or, you know, very rarely do you hear a voice described as beautiful. Rather, what you hear is liturgical. Liturgy was praised and celebrated by priests or bishops or whatever when it was well organized, well performed, when it was joyous, when it was full of full sounding celebration, but in good order. So people weren't singing out of place. They were singing the right things at the right time and in the right place. But yes, we do have evidence about training. There's a lot more evidence about the training of men than there is for women. But every liturgical participant, leader, what we might call the ritual agent or specialist, had to know the music for the services. Whether it was the priests, the deacons, the readers who read the scripture readings, the chanters, the choirs, they all had to know the music. And there were many different kinds of services and they all had different kinds of music. So there was a structure of schooling to see that that training was gained. But sometimes it was very local. I mean, in a big fancy city like Edessa or Nisibis, you know, you had a big academy to go to, Constantinople best of all. But sometimes it was just the priest in the local church. And I think a lot of the training for the women's choirs took place like that.
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Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. So there's a lot of like, like, you know, you show up a little bit early and you make sure that you, you know the words and, and that you can, can do it like when the service comes. But then there's like, I don't know, I think of like a kind of more advanced version that someone like, like Ephraim requires. Where Ephraim kind of invented this like verse chorus structure where you have like a kind of soloist who's going and the melody. And then there's a bigger choir that like, you know, everybody says, you know, let all rejoice, men and women alike, or bless be the babe who made humanity young again, or something like that. So you have kind of like big lear with a choir that can, I don't know, like you use it. Imagine like a pickup choir, like get coming along to that.
- [34:20]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
So we're not always exactly sure how different Hymns were performed. I mean, there's a variety of possibilities, but most likely would seem to be that a chanter or solo singer or the. Or the choir, in some instances, sang the verses, and then the choir led the congregation to sing a refrain. So you might have verses that are like four or six lines long, and then there's a refrain that's repeated. And after the first couple times, you know, there was a pretty easy refrain to remember, and. And the congregation could join you if there were a lot of verses. And in some of these hymns, there are dozens and dozens of verses, then the refrain would become really familiar to the congregation and they knew what to sing. We don't have any of the melodies from these ancient hymns from late antiquity that I'm writing about. None of the melodies survived to us. So what you would hear now in Orthodox churches is a much more recent musical tradition. So we don't know exactly what it sounded like, but it's clear that there would be familiar patterns of melodies that they would learn and remember. And they were simple enough. That's how they were effective as teaching tools. These weren't complicated compositions, like for a concert hall. This was something you, you know, you could go to your local church and you too, could join the singing of the refrains, and you learned. You could understand what was being sung and you learned.
- [35:49]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. And in the 5th, 6th century, we have people like Jacob Siruk, and I guess I think of, like, the. The lyrics get more complex, where it's not just one leader doing the kind of more complex parts, but that would require people to spend more time. You got to put in a little work to know these songs. Is that right?
- [36:10]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah. It's interesting, actually. Almost the reverse happened in the 4th century, as you say. We had Ephraim the Syrian, who really is the Shakespeare of Syriac, and he wrote extremely complex hymns, both complex in meter and in imagery. He wrote in 50 different meters. More than 50. I mean, it's staggering. And his hymns can be extremely complicated. When you're learning Syriac, he's one of the toughest ones to get your. But it's likely in that instance that he, or after him, you know, another chanter, he clearly had students and disciples who. Who wrote in his style and. And who sang his material. So in that case of these complicated hymns in the 4th century, probably he or a chanter sang the verses and then the choir led the refrains. I think in some instances, the choir also sang the verses, because Ephraim seems to imply that in certain places, but we don't know for sure, but after the 4th century, what we do know is that hymns became much simpler, both in meter and in content. And that continued through the centuries. So one of the things that characterizes Syriac literature, literature, over many, many centuries into the present is a constant abundance of people writing poetry, writing sung poetry, hymns, but off at different kinds. There's a lot of variety, but often in simple meters and in familiar content. I mean, I think an example of this would be if you were going to compose a Christmas hymn now, you know, you'd need certain things to be there, so people would recognize that it should be sung at Christmas. So you need, you know, you need a manger and a stable and, you know, you need ox and donkeys, and you need angels singing and shepherds and wise men. And then people know it's a hymn about Christmas. So there's familiarity in types of poetic lines and that continued to be used. So these hymns were very pragmatic. They had to be accessible to people who lived in towns and vill villages. And they had to also, in some instances, be sophisticated for those who lived in large cities where you might have a more sophisticated congregation. So I, I think of this as very, this is a pragmatic way of thinking about songs and music. What, what's going to be an efficient, clear way of teaching a story? Having people sing a refrain to that and remembering it?
- [38:52]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah. So what kind of training do you think, like the choirs themselves would have, would have had?
- [38:57]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
So we have strong evidence for the training of especially the boys and the men for the deacons and the clergy. And we have less strong evidence for the teaching of the women. But we have evidence, some evidence in Ephraim's writings, and he seems to have had students that he trained for assisting in liturgy so that they would have gone on to careers maybe as priests or bishops, but maybe as deacons, maybe as hymn writers like himself. So he had students for that purpose. But then the strongest evidence we have is from the very famous school of Nisibis, the city of Nisibis, which today is on the border between Syria and Turkey. And by the 6th century, the school of Nisibis had a curriculum that was a three year curriculum, and we have that. And there was music every year as part of that curriculum, and different music because there were many different kinds of services the students had to learn. And then we have other sources that refer to schools in monasteries or in villages or small towns where the instruction happened, as I mentioned, in the local church by the priest and in almost Every case where we have these references, the evidence is about teaching boys or men. For example, there's a wonderful scene in one chronicle about there was a monastery actually, in what is now Iraq, in fact. And the monks complained because the bishop was founding a new boarding school, a new one of these monastic schools there. And they said they wouldn't be able to. The monks complained that they wouldn't be able to do their meditations or. And they'd be kept awake all night because the boys would be practicing their alleluias and singing, seeing who could sing the loudest and the best, and they wouldn't have their quiet monastic life. And the bishop said, well, we've got to teach these things. And so the 75 monks left and went off, you know, into the deeper mountains to form a quiet place. So we have these kinds of stories. They're wonderful. But there are three absolutely clear source, only three from the 6th century that describe women's choirs as being educated, trained and rehearsed. So training for liturgical services seems to have involved basic literacy, for being able to read the scripture and read theology and read stories about saints, what we call hagiography. And then you also had to learn the music. And in the 6th century, John of Ephesus was a writer of. He was a bishop who wrote about different holy people he met in different places. And he mentions for girls as well as boys, that they needed a long education over years where they were learning, they were reading exactly these things, reading and writing. That was for scripture and theology and also music.
- [42:06]
So by analogy to the evidence for the boys, I think that convents of women and local churches were locations for teaching the girls and the women how to sing. And we have two 6th century sources that tell us that not only did Ephraim teach the Daughters of the Covenant his hymns, but that he rehearsed them every day. Every day. So this was a skill and it required training. And obviously some people had access to more extensive training than others, but. Right. This wasn't just, you know, let's all go along and hum this. This required skill. And I think, you know, an important agenda of mine is to recognize that that in fact was a real thing.
- [42:54]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. And not only was it. It was a skill, but it was also a. Was a form of authority. Right. Like people understood that these women were doing something important. And one of the sources, I think one of those two sixth sensory sources is this homily that from Jacob Saruk on Ephraim. Can you tell us about that and, like, what it teaches us about authority.
- [43:15]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
It's really interesting. So Jacob is beautiful homily that he preached in memory of Ephraim, who would have been dead for maybe 150 years by this point. Jacob argues that these choirs carry authority to teach because of their theological importance. I mean, that's a hefty claim. And so there's two points basically here. The first is, and Jacob hits this one head on. He says it's absolutely true that St. Paul in the New Testament tells us in 1 Corinthians 14 plainly that women should be silent in church. Yes, we have that in our scripture. But Jacob says that was the old dispensation. He says our great foremother Eve silenced the mouths of women when she disobeyed God. But we live in the new dispensation. Eve had a daughter, Mary, and Mary opened the mouths of women when she accepted God's command to bear the incarnate Son. So now Jacob says women should open their mouths and sing. And he cites the authority of the sacraments. He says both men and women are baptized in the same baptismal font. Both men and women take communion from the same chalice and patent. Both men and women receive the same salvation. So both men and women should open their mouths to sing praise with a loud voice. That's his favorite description of liturgical singing with a loud voice. He likes the verb thundering when he describes the women sing. They thundered.
- [44:57]
Mike Motilla
So like a true. A true choir director there, right? Like louder, louder. Sing louder. It's great. It's great. So we have Jacob's homily on Ephraim, but most of Jacob's homilies are not about Ephraim, they're about these characters from the Bible. And I want to try to give listeners a sense of how this worked. One thing we get a lot of in Syriac homilies are these attempts to get in the minds of biblical characters. There's some of this in Greek rhetorical training, but it's kind of thing like a historical novelist might do today. They take a little story like Abraham going to sacrifice Isaac, and then they imagine what would Sarah have been thinking throughout that whole thing. But one of the things I really appreciated about this book was that you help us to think about what it's like to listen to a story about a stock character. Like a sermon on one of these really well known characters. Almost never gives us a description of the past. Or if it is, it's because it's like Jacob is making an analogy like he'll be talking about the heavenly wedding, and then he'll talk about a wedding that was happening in 6th century Syria. But like, sometimes a sermon will reveal a kind of, like a prescription or an idealization or a fantasy. But I think most of the time when historians are reading these, what they're looking for is a kind of cultural worry. And so we ask, why are they talking about this thing at all? And so maybe we can start a little bit more abstractly with this. What do we learn from a description of one of these stock characters like Mary or this simple woman who pours perfume on Jesus's feet? What kind of social anxieties do these songs end up revealing?
- [46:30]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
So it's a really good question for Ephraim and Jacob. Both the great women of the Bible are described with the same words that they use when they praise the women women's choirs, which is an important thing to notice, I think. So when they're writing about women heroes from the Bible.
- [46:50]
They describe those women as being very loud, very bold, and audaciously persistent. They act and they speak on their own. So often in the stories of the Bible, as these.
- [47:05]
Particular writers, Ephraim and Jacob would choose as an example, men are either not in the story, or they are only present as obstacles the women must overcome. I mean, even when they rethi. This is true, though, in the New Testament. So you have a whole bunch of women. The Samaritan woman, the Canaanite woman, the hemorrhaging woman, the sinful woman. They don't. We don't even have names for these women. And in the New Testament stories, they come to approach Jesus by themselves. They don't have a man there to make it okay for them to speak to him. And sometimes they're rebuked in these stories by the disciples who are around you. Sometimes Jesus is really a jerk to these women. You know, he says, I don't want to talk to you. But these women, when Ephraim and Jacob are telling their stories, never flinch. They persist. And every time they are shown to be right and to be steadfast, they are wise. Often they are very learned. And they're certainly willing to argue with Jesus about the right way to understand scripture. Scripture. And they are teachers. They are teachers of divine wisdom to everyone, including the men who are in these same stories and are often also described as just being inept. You know.
- [48:23]
So often the disciples don't really get who Jesus is. I mean, that's even there in the New Testament. In these stories, you know, the women get it, and the women are the ones who.
- [48:36]
Show the way to act faithfully and therefore to receive divine favor. So the biblical women are portrayed this way in hymns and in sermons, whether they are married, whether they are widowed, whether they are unidentified by a social status. Sometimes they're poor, sometimes they're wealthy, sometimes we don't know. But at the very least, it shows us that women as persons could act on their own in public. A lot of times, these encounters, like between Jesus and the women who come to seek something happen in public right out there in the market square, you know, right in front of the whole town. And the men in these stories are simply not effective at getting the divine to respond to human need, whether it's healing or forgiveness. But the women are. And I'd say, you know, that shows some social anxiety about.
- [49:33]
Women'S capacity to act on their own and to be right.
- [49:37]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I was just thinking, listening to that and reflecting on the book that, you know, I mean, even if this is not explicitly a book about gender, like you. You see the, like, gender trouble showing up at these. In these stories, Right. This is where they're working out those anxieties.
- [49:54]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah.
- [49:54]
Mike Motilla
I mean, so, like, sometimes we get these memora or midorche about women's thoughts about one woman as she touches Jesus clothes, what was she thinking, that kind of thing. And then other times we have these dialogue songs. Can you tell us about the dialogue songs and what it would have been like to hear them?
- [50:12]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
This is everybody's favorite, right? So this is a particular form of madrashe, a particular form of. Of teaching songs or hymns. And these were called the sokyoto dialogue poems. So these were hymns that were constructed as a dialogue between two characters. And they were sung in verses that alternated between two choirs and the characters, one would be male and one would be female. And so it looks like they would, you know, the one male choir and one female choir would sing the two parts. So each hymn would have. You would have a short introductory section that said, this is the story I'm going to tell. And you'd have a short concluding doxology at the end. And in between, the singers sang a verse for each character, for each letter of the Alphabet. These were very long hymns, like 50 verses long with a refrain after every verse. So each. Because the characters had to have the same. Each one had to have a verse for verse for verse. You know, you couldn't have, like. You couldn't have three quarters of the verses for the male character and one quarter for the. No, they had to have the same amount. And so they're given the same airspace, as it were. They're given the same amount of words. And some of these songs, as I say, told biblical stories through an imagined dialogue between two biblical people. Especially interesting when one was a woman. The construction of these dialogues was an argument. So you would tell a story as an argument. So I'm going to give you an example in a second. But in the Bible, women are very rarely portrayed as speaking or they just make short little statements, if at all. But in a dialogue hymn, they need to speak 22 full verses in that role while they're arguing with the man who's speaking. 22 verses. So, for example, here's a good one. There was a dialogue hymn in Syriac between the Virgin Mary and her husband Joseph when he thought her pregnancy was because she had committed adultery. In the Gospel of Matthew, where we have this story, in Matthew, chapter one, Mary is completely silent and Joseph accuses her. And it takes an angel to come and convince Joseph of Mary's innocence. In this dialogue hymn for nearly 50 verses, Mary argues back with. Joseph says, I know how women become pregnant, and you are pregnant. And Mary says, you are wrong. And even in some of these verses, Joseph says, shut up. You're a woman. You can't talk to me. And she says, literally, I will not shut up. I will not be silent. So you see this, as you say.
- [53:00]
Negotiation of social roles about men and women, and she's right. And by the end of this long and. But the congregation would be singing that refrain after every verse. So they stand there like witnesses to this debate, this contest between Mary and Joseph. And at the end, you know, the choir says, and glory be to God, because, you know, Mary bore us her son. But you can see it's a very dramatic sort of form of, my name.
- [53:31]
Mike Motilla
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
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Mike Motilla
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates excludes Massachusetts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've had students like kind of do this in class and people are just like, they cannot believe that early Christians did this, right? Like, it just sounds, some of these sounds so contemporary. But these were not actually done, you know, in 21st century classroom. Can you tell us like, where, when, how? Like, when would somebody be actually singing these?
- [55:22]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
So the long dialogue hymns, which really are fun, were not sung probably in main Sunday morning liturgy, which had a very set program of what could be performed in it and what couldn't. So rather these kinds of hymns would have been sung either in evening vigil services.
- [55:41]
And sometimes those services went all night if it was before a feast day. And so you needed, you know, you needed long songs and you needed songs that involved people and to keep people awake. And sometimes they would have been sung in processions that would walk through the whole town or the whole city. And so you needed long hymns to pass the time because, you know, you had a long time to fill. But but sometimes additionally, sermons that were preached, and by that I mean sung or chanted in the liturgy included portions of the dialogues from these dialogue hymns. So Jacob of Siruk, for example, often preached sermons that included a lot of imagined dialogue between the biblical characters. Like his sermons on Mary contain her argument when the archangel Gabriel came to tell her that she was going to be, you know, hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. And she says, wait a minute, who are you? And you know, I know how women get pregnant and this isn't the way. And then so dialogue between Mary and the archangel or between Mary and Joseph, like the one I was just mentioning when the magi came to bring their gifts. And Mary doesn't want to let them in because she doesn't know who these people are and she wants to protect her son. These are dialogues that take place in the dialogue hymns. But when Jacob of Serug or other people were preaching Sermons about Mary or about the stories of Jesus. Sometimes they included verses that were pretty much the same as the ones in the dialogue hymns, you know, imagining the dialogue. So people would hear the choirs sing these dialogue hymns and they would sing their refrains, and then they would hear a sermon that would repeat some of those same words or very similar words that they had heard the quiet women's choir sing and that they had sung with them. And if they heard them quoted in a sermon that affirmed those words, affirmed even more the authority that this was a sacred teaching. And, you know, so these different liturgical roles reinforced the sacred authority that these different voices would have carried. And the congregation heard, they heard the women's choir singing that. They heard the voice of the, the bishop or the priest echoing that. And they sang in response. And I think there was a lot of mutual respect that was carried across in between these different real and imagined voices repeatedly. And we, we do repeatedly in these hymns have a character who says, woman, be silent. And the woman responds, I won't be silent. So, you know, that's an interesting.
- [58:33]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, that, that, like the, the callbacks too, like from the, the all night vigil, then shows up in the church. Like, it, it kind of reaffirms like the whole vigil. I don't know, it's like, like, I don't know, when someone repeats a line from a camp experience a long time ago. And, and, and all of a sudden that whole camp experience is now present in the church again. And, and I, I said, I'm trying to picture kind of how, how those songs and those kind of powerful experiences end up leading to these choirs taking on a kind of authority. How do you imagine these dialogues, songs taught people to see the actual choirs?
- [59:13]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah, I mean, that's. And also a challenge.
- [59:18]
These dialogue hymns all had the same basic plot. This was a contest between truth and falsehood or between faith and reason. One character sang God's truth and the other character sang objections to that. And it's a contest, which in some hymns was humorous. I mean, Mary arguing with the archangel is a very funny hymn, and in some cases it could be pretty brutal. The hymn between Mary and Joseph is nasty. Joseph keeps arguing the position of reason, that he knows how women get pregnant. And Merrick keeps arguing the position of faith, that she's innocent and it's God's work and she's got to win that argument. And of course she does. And it's especially poignant, as I was mentioning, when the male character repeatedly tells the female character to be Silent or to shut up because she's a woman. And repeatedly the female character says, I will not.
- [60:20]
So an interesting kind of byproduct of this in Syriac hymns. Interestingly, women are always the heroes in the story, and the men are always wrong. We have sometimes similar hymns and similar storytelling in Greek, the kontakia that Romanos the melodist wrote. But even there, women are not always the hero. Sometimes they're the ones trying to hold the men back. Abraham going off to sacrifice Isaac. Sarah is often portrayed as trying to prevent him doing that because she doesn't want her one and only son to die. But in Syriac, it's women who have the role of being the heroes. And I think, as I mentioned, Ephraim and Jacob both use the same words to describe these biblical women and to describe the women's choir. So when Jacob says.
- [61:18]
Because women's choirs are thundering forth their praise, the work of God is happening. And when he says, because the Canaanite woman thundered out God's truth, God did. Jesus did what needed to be done, I think people hurt that and respected what was coming from women's voices.
- [61:43]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I guess that leads into another thing. You mentioned in the book about listening to liturgy like this was a learning how to hear. This was its own kind of skill. Can you tell us about that?
- [61:56]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah. Jacob of Saruk talks about listening in liturgy. He's not the only preacher to do this. But how listening needs to be an active process. You need to receive the hymns and the sermon. You need to receive them deep into your heart and deeply engage them. You need to be changed by hearing them, by receiving them. So he presents that these sacred stories were powerful and capacious narratives. Women were unjustly accused and they could out argue men. Women could choose to change their own lives. Women acted without men to protect or advocate for them. And I think one thing I think is that people could hear those stories differently if they were men or women. Those stories might sound different to you. I think that's an important thing. But there was also some technical ways in which stories gained multiple narratives. For example, in prayers or very short hymns, sometimes biblical characters were referred to only by a title and not by their name. So you might have a short hymn or prayer that mentioned the despised woman. Well, sometimes the despised woman was the sinful woman who repented her life of sin and washed Jesus feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. But sometimes the Virgin Mary was the despised woman because people doubted her pregnancy. So the different same Title could refer to different characters, and sometimes that could give you a very different interpretation of the story. And I think men and women could hear different. Could hear these stories differently, and there was a certain amount of room for the listener to be able to flesh out what the story was.
- [63:48]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, and that gets. The other thing that you talk about is the authority where the words that kind of bounce around biblical characters end up bouncing onto the choirs as well. So you talk about Mary then becoming not just. Just despise woman or, you know, Mary, Mary, but of becoming a model of priesthood. Can you tell us what it means for, like Mary to be a priest?
- [64:12]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah, we have. These are very. These are very intriguing. We have a few instances. Both the Virgin Mary and the sinful woman are sometimes presented as performing the role of a priest when their actions were portrayed as somehow sacramental in their behavior towards Christ. And in those instances, then women are being imaged as priests. So what does that mean? It doesn't mean that this was an advocacy for the ordination of women to the priesthood. And actually it means that female imagery was being applied to the actual male priest. So I'll give an example. Jacob of Saruk has a very beautiful passage where Mary, the Virgin Mary, has agreed to become pregnant and receive the incarnation in her womb. She says to Gabriel, let it be to me according to thy will. So she prepares her body to receive that incarnation of the Divine Son. And Jacob presents her, thinking about her body as a house that is going to receive a royal visitor. So she cleans and she tidies and she sweeps out all the dust or debris of bad habits or sinful thoughts. And she repairs and paints and adorns herself with virtues and prayers. And while she's cleaning her body and herself, she sings hymns and sacred songs. And when her body is sufficiently prepared, she then, according to Jacob, opened her mouth and said, now let it be to me according to thy will. And then the conception happened. God enters into her body. So the description is exactly the same as what a priest would have done on a Sunday morning to prepare the church building for liturgy. And again, that's a context where God enters the body of the faithful as a collective, just as God entered the body of this one woman, the Virgin Mary, now he would enter the church as a body of faithful. And the priest needs to make sure that the church is clean and tidy and that there are fresh candles in the candlestick sand, and there's fresh incense to burn in the sensors and that, you know, dust is swept away and, you know, the litter of the week is cleared out so that this beautiful liturgy can take place. So this imagery invites us to think about priests in terms that are rather different from masculine terms. Almost like a housewife, you know, preparing for an honored guest. So maybe that imagery invites us to think about women in other roles than their usual ones. And, you know, could a priest be female? But also, how does this help us think about priesthood? And that's a very different way of thinking about priests than simply to have male models.
- [67:17]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, I guess I don't want to paint too rosy a picture here. Like, this still was a pretty patriarchal world.
- [67:26]
I think this comes through clearest in Jacob's homily on the Canaanite woman, just to make sure I'm on the same page. So the story is a woman comes to Jesus, asking him to heal her daughter. And Jesus, seeing that she's not from Israel, says, you know, go away, and calls her a dog. And the woman in, like, one of the great comebacks in Scripture says something like, you know, sure, yes, I'm a dog. But even the dogs get the scraps of the food from the master's table that gets tossed aside. And it seems like in that moment, Jesus, like, hears it and knows that he's kind of congested and heals the kid. And Jacob retells the story in really amazing details. But there's this moment of right at the end where all of her learning and eloquence gets, like, really shut down.
- [68:08]
You can fill in the story, tell me what I missed, but can you tell us about kind of what happens at the end of that homily and what it tells us about the boundaries of women's voices?
- [68:18]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah, actually, that homily, the Canaanite woman, is a great example because she's so loud and everybody's telling her to shut up, and she just. Just won't do it. But an actual. A sharper moment of patriarchal oppression, as it were, happens in Jacob's Hanley on the Samaritan woman, who, in the Gospel of John, chapter four, this is the woman Jesus meets at the well. And they have a long dialogue. It's actually the longest dialogue between Jesus and a woman, a female character or maybe any character. And the Samaritan woman is portrayed like the Canaanite woman as being a heathen because she's not a Jew in the sense of Jesus and his followers. The Samaritans were different, followed a different tradition. And so in the story, in the Gospel and in Jacob's homily, the Samaritan woman returns to her city and says, I've met the Messiah and reveals Jesus to them to be the Messiah they're waiting for. And so this is a great moment for her, for her city, and for Jesus. And at the end of Jacob's homily, he has her go overboard where she begins to say, I am the source of revelation, I am the source of truth, because I have brought you this proud announcement that the Messiah is with us. And he describes her pride turning into overweening arrogance. He actually uses the exact words, chutzpah. And so he shuts her down, the community shuts her down. And the homily ends. Right. She shuts down. It's like popping a balloon. And it's very hard to think that Jacob isn't warning women to be careful about their speech, not to overstep their place. And, you know, there's an agenda of social control. It's okay for the Canaanite woman or the Samaritan woman to.
- [70:18]
Speak out of turn, but they were biblical women in the past, and they were corrected even as they were getting things right. Here you are. And be careful. You know, I. There is a. An agenda of social control here, and it's an important one.
- [70:35]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. And I mean, like, some of the worst things that, like the kind of, most sexist things that show up, like, Jacob is like, not the worst offender by. By any means. And. But. But you point out that that most of, like the worst kind of most sexist stuff actually shows up in monastic contexts or in places where they're just. There weren't a lot of women around like, it. It's like a lot of guys talking a big game to other guys that they would never say in front of a woman. Can you tell us about this kind of other context?
- [71:01]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
This is so important because historians or people just reading these texts who aren't specialists, often conflate them as if all of these texts were known to everybody. And all these things were said, said to people all the time. But the strongest misogynistic language, and we certainly have it in Syriac, as we do everywhere else happens in literature that was specifically men talking to men, whether that was in male monasteries or male schools, men preaching to men. And often in that context, they said that women were the source of all evil. But liturgy is not that place. Liturgy was the place where the whole public was there. It was a civic occasion. Families were present, men, women, children, rich, poor, monastics and non monastics. And in liturgy, this is not the message and we have hymns, for example. Eve is.
- [72:02]
Mentioned in every liturgy every week in the prayers and in the daily service. And Eve is called in liturgy to hold her head high and to sing with joy because Christ has redeemed everyone. So the message is very different. And the Eve of liturgy, who's named among the list of saints, is different from the Eve in these other contexts where men are among men and, you know, something else is going on. But in liturgy, there is a place for. That's an important part of what liturgy is. This is a place for everyone. So it can't be a place where one kind of person is condemned beyond redemption. So it's a different.
- [72:50]
Female presence in liturgy.
- [72:53]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [72:55]
An interview I just did recently was with Ellen Neilberger, and she as an essay about young men in these role playing speeches where they're playing the role of women. How easy it was because there were no women in the classroom for boys to just kind of float some pretty wild ideas about women. And it's not just boys who do that. These monks were doing similar kinds of things. But at least in liturgy, I don't know, you have to bump up against another actual person.
- [73:26]
And it changes the kinds of things people say. At least you hope so. I don't know. Sorry, that was off topic a little bit. But when we get used to seeing women having authority in church, I think then it becomes easier to see how and why they can have authority outside of church too. Right. I've been harping on church worlds, and partly it's because, you know, church, like I keep saying church. But a lot of, like, Christian things are also like public events and they're outside. And liturgy was also kind of a civil affair. So can you tell us about these kind of singing women outside of church walls? You have a bunch of sources for this. Chronicles, Judas, Pseudo, Joshua. The stylite John Fabis tells some stories about this. One of my favorites was from the Syriac Codex Romanani, which has this. It's like the beginning of a procession that was going to welcome a bishop into a provincial town. Can you tell us about that? It's just this kind of amazing scene.
- [74:28]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah. A great deal of ancient worship, Christian or otherwise, took place outdoors. And that included liturgical worship and processions. It was very public. Everybody could hear these hymns and songs and sermons, not just Christians. We haven't have descriptions of competing processions or competing choirs, you know, Jews and Christians or different kinds of Christians. So the source here referred to is very interesting. 5th century, what to do when a bishop visits your town. And so it describes. It's the manual for how to do that. And it describes you need the people to make a procession that's in liturgical order, begins with the bishop, followed by the clergy, followed by the deacons, followed by the choirs, followed by the lay people. And so you would come out, you met the bishop at the city gate, and then you needed to lead the bishop in that procession, singing the whole way through the town.
- [75:27]
To arrive at the church, where the bishop would then conduct his special liturgy. So this must have taken hours because it describes that.
- [75:38]
Every so many meters, like every so many blocks, the procession would stop, and the bishops, the deacons would sing a quick litany, you know, for the peace of the world, for the peace of our community, for the people in our community. And the choirs would lead the responses. And everybody would sing, lord have mercy and Amen. How many times. And so every. So every so many blocks of the city, the procession would stop again and there'd be this little litany and a response with the choirs leading the congregation, and then you would keep going. And the.
- [76:17]
Manual that you mention mentions the women's choirs. And I think there were 10 stops before you arrived in the church, and then the procession accompanying the bishop inside the church. So when we had this kind of event, when liturgical processions moved through the streets of a town, it turns the whole of that civic space into a church. The city becomes a church building, in a sense, with the streets like the aisles of the sanctuary. And so you're sanctifying all of that public space. It rendered the women's choirs even more visible and certainly rendered them audible. And I think even. I think it also showed them to be even more important because their singing and their leadership was visible and audible outside the church walls and in the civic community. It also, in larger terms, because this wasn't unique to Syriac to have these outside processions. There was a real power dynamic here where Christianity had been declared the state religion of the Roman Empire at the end of the 4th century. And these kinds of processions demonstrated the triumph and power of Christianity by, you know, sort of taking over that whole civic space. But it's certainly, I think, enhanced by adding this very public element to the singing of these choirs.
- [77:48]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. And I mean, it shows us like. I mean, these women are like the face or the sound of Christianity in public. Right. It's just, you know, like, when we think about authority, like, we've got to kind of picture them. The other place that they would be seen outdoors a lot would be the lamenting women at funerals who would kind of weep wildly, loudly. Sorry. This still happens at funerals today, like at least Persian ones. Like, you know, kind of public criers that help others show some emotion. Like they kind of cry so that other people can start crying.
- [78:21]
Is that kind of. Is that what we should be thinking of?
- [78:25]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Yeah. So throughout the ancient world, women performed a venerated role of lamentation at funerals. That was a professional role often. And this still exists in some societies. In Greece, in Ireland, professional women mourners, a family might hire them for the wake or for the funeral procession. And we have some biblical stories about tragic deaths in the Jewish Bible as well as the Christian Bible, where women are performing that role. And in Christian liturgies that retold biblical stories, women were often represented in that role of mourning. The Virgin Mary was weeping at the death of Jesus is a classic example of the mother mourning for her son accompanied by her handmaids. So mourning women. But these choirs of women to sing at funerals, we have these attested in Greek, you were mentioning, paying for these choirs. So we have in the law codes, actually in the Justinianic law code, Constantinople, that choirs of women, ascetic women, should be hired for funerals, especially for the poor. The church would pay for this to make sure that mourning was done in an appropriate way. And women's choirs in that role of lamenting was an important task that they had. So it was a task that. That the Syriac women's choirs did. But it was also a task that we see women's choirs doing, for example, in Greek churches.
- [79:56]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. And, you know, part of, like, you get into some of the detail in this. You talk about Jacob's memoir on the story of Solomon splitting the baby in two. There's two different women who claim that they're the mom of the child. And Solomon says, like, okay, well, we're just cut the baby in half, and then the real mom is. Is shattered and says the other woman can have the baby. It's all. And says, aha, she's the real mom. Jacob tells this with real detail and emotion. It's, you know, it's a classic story for a reason. But what you show from that homily is that we have these choirs that make it possible for kind of every person's story to become a biblical epic that they, you know, like the ordinary lives and ordinary sorrows. Just because they're common doesn't mean that they don't feel big. Like, you know, a lot of children died in this world, and it was. And it was shattering. Right? Like, I. And like, these choirs, you know, they are the public face of Christianity and power, but they're also a way to make grief visible and meaningful. Like, not, like, better. But, you know, the fact that you have, I don't know, some rituals around the pain, it can help. But can you tell us a little bit about, like, how choirs were doing this? How they link, like, of personal lives to sacred stories?
- [81:12]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
I think when a biblical story portrayed a tragic death and the women in that story performed their grief and mourning, you have a mirror image to what would take place in families when a beloved member died. So, you know, if you had Mary lamenting her son, you know, any family where a son had died, you know, in early adulthood, you know, that's a tragedy. And here you have a portrayal of Mary weeping that grief that you yourself feel. And so in that sense, these biblical. We have quite a number of biblical tragedies that were written about in this way, presented as a story in these hymns and sermons. That way every story could become. Every. Every biblical story could become the story of your family, or you could see your family grieving for your lost loved ones in every biblical story that you heard. As if every story becomes. And then every story becomes shared. Every biblical story is our own story, and our own stories are also part of this biblical story. So we have stories in the Bible, tragic deaths of children or spouses or parents. And when you have that lament that's being sung and you're standing there in the congregation listening to Eve, whose heart is devastated because her son Abel has been murdered, child, you can picture your grief inside her grief that's being named. And I think there was a very powerful dynamic, emotional dynamic in linking personal lives with sacred stories. Just like that. That's my grief. Sounds like that.
- [83:10]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. And that. And that ability to do the. You know, just like that. That's. They're naming that. I mean, it's a. I don't know. It's like a soft power, but it is power, right? It is like real authority that comes into somebody's life with moments like that.
- [83:29]
We should start to wrap up. There's so many things to talk about in this book, but you talk in the afterword about this totally fascinating and honestly pretty moving discussion of the legacy of these choirs. There's been a real resurgence of them all over the world in Syriac Orthodox and Community of the East, Church of the east communities. Can you tell us about how these choirs live on today?
- [83:52]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
So this is. Syriac Christianity is a living Tradition. And these churches continue as living churches, and so too does the tradition of women's choirs in them. So these underwent a real resurgence during the 20th century in the Middle east and now also in the Diaspora communities in Europe, in North America, in Australia.
- [84:16]
These churches, whether Church of the east or Syriac Orthodox, have thriving and flourishing choirs that include women. Sometimes they are women's choirs, sometimes they are men mixed choirs, and the churches are proud of them. The hymns have changed, aspects of the liturgy have changed, as they have for any, you know, religious community that's existed across centuries. So, but the women's choir, now, they stand at the front of the congregation before the altar. They balance the choir of male deacons. That's on the other side. And they lead the congregation in singing the traditional Syriac hymns. And so this has been a very vibrant. Is a very vibrant part of what is now part of these church traditions. And often they'll tell you that it was St. Ephrem who founded women's choirs, and they sing in that tradition. And that's a powerful thing to hear.
- [85:13]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. Okay. I asked most guests, kind of at the end, what they hope readers take from the book, but can I split this in two for you? For non academic, what do you hope they take from a book like this? And then how do you hope this book will change our understandings of late antiquity?
- [85:29]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
For non academics? I hope that. I would imagine this would be maybe most important to people who are part of Christian tradition. But I want them to see that there's a clear history, a concrete history, that women had central roles in ancient Christianity, not simply as nuns or as a devoted layperson, but as important figures and contributors in the liturgy. This history has been ignored. It's been forgotten, it's been denied, but it happened. Women did this work, and we need to remember that women have been crucial to Christian history, including its sacred ritual. This is, you know, sometimes people have said to me, oh, this is just modern feminism. No, no, no. Ephraim was not a modern feminist, and neither was Jacob of Sarut. So this is a history we need to remember. And then for scholars, I would like scholars to take seriously that liturgy is part of social history and of daily life in the ancient world.
- [86:37]
And I would like historians to be able to remember that women were savvy and smart and active agents in their own lives and in their communities and in the ancient Christian world. They made important contributions, not simply as mothers, not simply as nuns, not simply as widows or as wealthy women or, you know, an empress behind the throne. They had contributions they made. I think we have some deeply mistaken scholarly habits. They're like default setting when it comes to telling history. And often that means that we leave women out. We need to rethink how we tell history and how we include women in it and how we learn from that history.
- [87:24]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, great. Okay, last question. What are you working on now?
- [87:29]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Two, a couple of new projects. One is a small one. There's a letter that Jacob of Serug wrote to two former prostitutes who became ascetics. Very interesting letter. People have not noticed it, but there it is.
- [87:44]
And so that's a smaller project because it's a very short letter and we don't have any other, you know, we don't have a letter they wrote back to him or anybody. But, you know, it's interesting by itself. And then with my colleague Adam Becker from nyu, we are reading together a group of Syriac sermons about Jesus and the Samaritan woman. And these have not been translated. They're attributed to Isaac of Antioch. There were a bunch of Isaacs of Antioch. They seem to be 5th century. They've been sitting in a 7th century manuscript and nobody's looked at them. So we're doing it. We're doing it. And I'm excited about both of these.
- [88:24]
Mike Motilla
Yeah. This is also why more people should be reading Syriac because you might get to do this kind of work. This is really great, Susan. Congratulations on the book.
- [88:33]
Susan Ashbur Carvey
Thank you so much.
- [88:34]
Mike Motilla
Yeah, thanks for talking.
- [88:48]
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
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Mike Motilla
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Susan Ashbur Carvey
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