Name: LARISSA RODRIGUES SATHLER
Publication date: 17/09/2018
Advisor:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| GILVAN VENTURA DA SILVA | Advisor * |
Examining board:
| Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| BELCHIOR MONTEIRO LIMA NETO | Internal Examiner * |
| ÉRICA CRISTHYANE MORAIS DA SILVA | Internal Examiner * |
| GILVAN VENTURA DA SILVA | Advisor * |
Summary: In this dissertation, we investigated how women were represented in Episcopal discourses of the fourth century, when consecrated virgins and widows became a fundamental component of the mystical body of the Church. To do so, we examine the treatises De uirginibus and De uiduis, in which Ambrose, bishop of the Church of Milan (374-397), formulates a set of disciplinary rules directed to the bodies of the devotees with the intention of sacralizing them. The Ambrosian ascetic discourse provides us with an excellent opportunity to study better the established power relationship between the sexes that marked the episcopal communities of the West, since they reveal a representation of women according to the codes of masculine domination. In its turn, the propagandistic character of the ascetic life contained in the treatises investigated in this research makes possible to understand how female asceticism became in Late Antiquity a way by which devout women, even on the borders of ecclesiastical offices, gained prestige in their respective communities. With regard to the Milanese congregation in particular, we suggest that Ambrosio's speech envisages the formation of a female hierarchy, in which the subjects' position is explained, among other factors, by the degree of sexual abstinence. Therefore, we are talking about a hierarchy in which virgins, followed by widows, would occupy a place higher than married women. In theoretical terms, we use the following concepts to perform this dissertation: representation, by Roger Chartier; body, by José Carlos Rodrigues; gender, by Joan Scott; performativity, by Judith Butler; male domination, by Pierre Bourdieu; and discipline, by Michel Foucault. Regarding the methodology, we use Content Analysis, as proposed by Laurence Bardin.
