From the Socratics to Augustine, men used women’s voices in philosophical dialogues to speak as experts on the body, especially in three aspects: birth, the physical details of death, and erotic desire. These connections were inaugurated by Plato and Xenophon. However, a changing anthropology, and especially the belief that the body persisted after death, led certain Christian authors to increase the role given to female characters. When the body was revalued and brought into the centre of philosophical focus, women’s voices moved from reported speech into direct speech. Simultaneously, late ancient Christian authors reflected on the inherent connection between erotic desire and the genre of the dialogue itself, matching their subject to their form. Using female characters in their dialogues helped male authors come to know certain things that using male voices could not do as well, by thinking through specific topics ‘like a woman’; the female, with her culturally embodied nature, became a model of an ideal life which insisted on the persistence of the body, even in the afterlife.

This chapter critically examines two long-held beliefs with regards to Thecla, the first Christian heroine to take on male dress: 1) that she is the forerunner of Byzantine transvestite saints and 2) that her tale is a reference point for their narratives (fourth to seventh centuries). Arguably, these claims are usually based on hasty assumptions or insufficient evidence built on one particular transvestite saint’s Life, the Life and Martyrdom of Eugenia. In this chapter, I discuss Thecla’s literary legacy both in the wider tradition of Greek hagiography and specific cross-dressers’ Lives. I demonstrate that the Life of Eugenia is an exception among cross-dressers’ tales in terms of its frequent referencing and evident modeling of the APT. This point is especially salient considering the APT’s many echoes in certain Greek hagiographies that are not concerned with cross-dressers. Finally, I propose some new perspectives on how the motif of cross-dressing traveled from the APT until it appeared in later hagiographical accounts. I argue that the Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena, Life and Miracles of Thecla, and Life of Eusebia called Xenê represent important intermediary steps both in the interpretation of Thecla as a cross-dresser and in the development of this literary theme.

Although there is no concrete surviving evidence that the Acts of Paul or the Passio sanctae Theclae circulated in Ireland, there are a number of references to Thecla in medieval Irish martyrologies and devotional literature. These sparse references to the proto-martyr are too few to reconstruct the true extent of her cult in medieval Ireland or to assess her possible impact on Insular hagiography. However, one curious uniting feature shared by these fragmentary references to Thecla is that they are all in versified form. Thecla is also venerated in litany-like verse prayers in both Old and Middle Irish where she is included in groupings of significant apostolic figures. Late antique and early medieval continental Latin sources in which Thecla is referred to in a similar context may provide the likely roots of transmission. These possible Latin sources, however, are not all in verse form. Therefore, the choice of a poetic medium coupled with the use of the vernacular may provide precious evidence for the intended audience and reception milieu of such popular hagiographical texts.

Perhaps more than most ancient traditions, Thecla’s has been characterized by controversy, and yet little attention has been paid to the positive value of indeterminacy in the Thecla tradition. After offering an overview of approaches to the Acts of Paul and Thecla and related texts over the last half-century, we ask how the open qualities of Thecla as a protagonist may have enhanced her tradition’s ability to serve as the basis for successive re-imaginings. We conclude by suggesting that as ‘an ambiguous heroine in an unstable story’ Thecla exemplifies the value of indeterminacy and instability in hagiography.

How is it that female figures—though whether they are properly female is debatable—come to voice in Christian texts of late antiquity? How, in particular, do their voices enter into debates about desire, traditionally the province of masculine speech? And what do these virginal voices sound like? Are they distinct and recognizable to our reading ears? There is a story to be told, and it starts with Thecla. We might say that every Christian virgin who arrogates voice in some sense follows Thecla, speaking her desire in speech that both is and is not her own. Thecla, in other words, both inaugurates and serves as a figure for virginal voice in its startling, in-breaking forcefulness. But Thecla, however definitively novel, follows others as well. This chapter first backtracks to consider Thecla’s precursors, Diotima (Plato, Symposium) and Leucippe (Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon). It then follows the reworking of those figures in the Acts of Thecla and Methodius’ Symposium respectively. Finally, it explores the legacy of Thecla in two little-known late ancient Latin dialogues that feature notably voluble virgins—the Lives of Saints Helia and Constantina, respectively.

In this chapter, I explore the connections between Tertullian’s de Baptismo, the Acts of Paul, and the supposedly Cainite Gnostic text, the Gospel of Judas. Are Tertullian’s comments concerning both Thecla and Cainites accurate? First, in de Baptismo, Tertullian attacks a Cainite woman for using the example of Thecla as a model to justify women teaching in churches. Further, he criticizes the Cainite woman for denying the practice of baptism within some of the churches of North Africa. Second, the Gospel of Judas—a ‘so called’ Cainite text—seems to affirm the rite of baptism. Do Tertullian’s comments concerning Cainites betray an unfamiliarity with it? Third, in the Acts of Paul, the rite of baptism is affirmed generally, while specifically Thecla is commissioned to teach and even baptizes herself. Why Tertullian would cite the case of Thecla is not clear. How does one synthesize this seemingly contradictory evidence? This chapter focuses upon sorting out these inconsistencies. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how some of the churches of North Africa were reading the Acts of Paul as a form of hagiography that was inspiring women in their faith while also impacting their understanding of Christian rituals and practices (i.e., baptism and missions).

The “Tale of the Virtuous Woman” (TVW) by the Sufi hagiographer and poet, Farīd al-Dīn ʿAttār, is quite unique, as Sufi tales go, in its depiction of a woman from a well-to-do family: young, beautiful, and virtuous, she becomes a recognized spiritual and civic leader independently and in a foreign land. It, thus, invites further inquiry. It has been noted that the TVW, which appears in ʿAttār’s long narrative poem (masnavī), the Ilāhīnāmah (Book of the Divine), shares popular motifs with ancient romances. Detailed examinations reveal that it is closer in affinity to tales of female Christian saints and heroines, such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla, Life of Eugenia, Life and Miracles of Thecla, and Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, in the way they adopt popular motifs for religio-spiritual aims. Strikingly, the former three and the TVW similarly depict independently attained female leadership. This article, thus, analyzes the versions of the TVW circulating in Iran and the possible routes the aforementioned Christian narratives circulated within and without the Iranian world. Then, it offers an analysis of the TVW and Life of Eugenia which, although separated in time, space, culture, and language, similarly explore female leadership and spiritual, familial, and civic conversion.

In the first half of the fifth century, at the origins of Armenian literature, an anonymous author translated the apocryphal Acts of Thecla from the Syriac version of the Greek text (second century). The translation rapidly furthered the spread of the legend across Armenia. In that same century, three works written directly in Armenian presuppose the legend of Thecla. This article focuses on the narrative patterns and the ways in which the paradigms of holiness embodied by Thecla have influenced the representation of holy women who, in the Armenian tradition, are associated with the fundamental stages of the Christianization of Armenia. Thecla, indeed, served as a model of female sanctity along three important lines, namely as holy virgin, teacher and apostle, and martyr. As the venerated proto-martyr, she served as a model for the first female martyrs in the history of Armenian Christianity, respectively, in the apostolic age (Sanduxt) and at the time of the foundation of the Church of Armenia (Hṙip‘simē). The model of holy female apostle is found in the Armenian Martyrdom of Photine too. The Armenian tradition also contributed to the development of the legend and helped to make of Thecla a holy protector of Nicene orthodoxy.

This chapter uses three stories of young women’s relationships with their parents to increase our understanding of Christianity’s impact on classic familial values in late antiquity. It is focused on the ways in which the famous second century story of the virgin Thecla, and her difficult relationship with her mother Theocleia, was read and reused in later Christian stories. In the Passion of Eugenia we see how Thecla’s story becomes a catalyst for the eponymous heroine to follow Thecla’s example and reject the marriage proposed for her. She does so, however, without creating the rift with her parents that Thecla’s departure necessitates. That careful reuse demonstrates the developing uncertainty over whether the rise of Christian asceticism necessitated the destruction of the traditional household. In Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina, we see the Cappadocian bishop again using Thecla to think with, as he feels his way towards a new solution to this same problem. These case studies not only show us the changing landscape of Christian thinking on marriage, family, and asceticism, but also reveal the complex matrix of meanings latent in the original Acts of Paul and Thecla.