Cassandra M M Casias

The lives of women in late antique North Africa were shaped to a large extent by legal status and family roles. Enslaved women experienced frequent sexual exploitation at the hands of their male enslavers, who saw these encounters as proof of their masculinity. Married women, meanwhile, endured the double standard of close supervision and suspicion over their potential infidelity, as well as the physical abuse that could result. In Christian writings about mothers, the mother-child bond is seen as powerful enough to threaten the pursuit of a religious life. Widows, due to their high status in African churches, enjoyed such influence in Christian communities that unmarried women and women with living husbands attempted to join their ranks. Although consecrated virgins were thought to receive the highest rewards in heaven, the constant threat of the loss of their physical purity justified a higher degree of surveillance over them, by either their families or their bishops. To varying ...

This article contextualizes the letter that Radegund (c. 520–587 CE), who had been married to the Merovingian king Clothar, wrote to the bishops of Gaul to establish her new convent. Gregory of Tours preserved this letter in his account of the rebellion that erupted in Radegund’s convent two years after she died. By analyzing this letter as a tool of Gregory’s historical narrative and then evaluating it as an independent source for Radegund’s life, this paper demonstrates that Gregory’s deliberate misinterpretation of Radegund’s letter illuminates the conflict between holy women and bishops for religious influence in Late Antiquity.