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"It is an old, yet powerful story. A beautiful young woman falls in love, and try as they might, her disapproving family and friends fail to dissuade her from that love or keep her from her beloved. Persistent and uncompromising, the young woman disrupts the social order of her world, be it that of high school or high society. And by tale's end, either the lover and her beloved are integrated back into society, or a new world order arises (uneasily sometimes) out of the ashes. Perusing through a list of popular young adult novels, teen movies, and ancient romances, one may be struck by the sheer number of stories that follow this arc. The same storyline was also popular in the late antique and medieval periods. A subset of the latter, however, follow a slightly different track. They detail the lives and trials of women who have fallen deeply and irrevocably in love with the transcendental, namely the word of God, and some, even on pain of torture and death, claim Christ as their eternal bridegroom"--
List of contents
Introduction Ghazzal Dabiri; Part I. An Act to Follow: 1. A Cainite invocation of Thecla? The reception of the Acts of Paul in North Africa as exemplified in Tertullian's de Baptismo Jeremy W. Barrier; 2. Saint Thecla in Ge¿ez hagiographical literature: From confessor to martyr Damien Labadie; 3. Versified martyrs: The reception of Thecla from the Latin West to Medieval Ireland Caitríona Ó Dochartaigh; 4. The reception of the Acts of Thecla in Armenia: Thecla as a model of representation for holy women in ancient Armenian literature Valentina Calzolari; 5. Thecla beyond Thecla: Secondary characters in Syriac hagiography Flavia Ruani; 6. Shifting the poetics of gender ambiguity: The Coptic naturalisation of Thecla Arietta Papaconstantinou; Part II. An Act To Surpass: 7. Thecla, the first cross-dresser? The Acts of Paula and Thecla and the lives of Byzantine transvestite saints Julie Van Pelt; 8. From Diotima to Thecla and beyond: Virginal voice in the lives of Helia and Constantina Virginia Burrus; 9. Reception and rejection: Thecla and the Acts of Paul and Thecla in the Passion of Eugenia and other Latin texts Klazina Staat; 10. A medieval Sufi Thecla? Female civic and spiritual leadership in ¿Att¿r's "Tale of the Virtuous Woman" and the Life and Passion of Eugenia Ghazzal Dabiri; Afterword: Thecla and the power of an open story Kate Cooper.
About the author
Ghazzal Dabiri is an Iranist who specializes in narratives of kingship, kinship, and sainthood. She received her PhD from UCLA and has held positions at various institutions including Columbia University and currently the University of Maryland. A Fulbright Scholar, she also held a European Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at Ghent University.Flavia Ruani is a researcher at the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, CNRS, Paris. She specializes in late antique and medieval Syriac Christianity, focussing on religious controversies, manuscript studies, hagiography, and the history of Manichaeism. She has translated into French the Hymns against Heresies by Ephrem the Syrian (2018).
