Sacred fictions

Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, examplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxial representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. The sacred fictions of holy women were written within the context of the institutionalization of the male priesthood and the masculinization of church worship, Coon contends. The windows they open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.