paola francesca moretti - Not only ianua diaboli. A short overview on the role played by the Bible in the Latin fathers’ discourse about women.

In my paper I will present a short overview on the multifarious use of the Bible in the construction of female gender model by the Latin fathers (III-IV centuries). I will dwell not only on authors whose importance for this subject is taken for granted (Ambrosiaster), but also on less obvious ones, such as Hilarius of Poitiers and Ambrose of Milan.

Sometimes passages of the Scripture (mostly from Genesis and Paul’s epistles) are commented upon as a whole, in order to affirm female’s subordination to male, or – more seldom – equivalence between the two; in other cases single verses of the Bible are just referred to, in order to embellish female positive or negative portraits, as e.g. happens in texts belonging to the genre de cultu feminarum.  

In this overview we will often be confronted with inconsistent and somewhat contradictory views, often expressed in passages by the same author. 

The reason for this is that the Fathers’ discourse about women both aims at shaping the Christians’ perception of female and, at the same time, «responds to what happens» (cf. G. Clark, Women in Late Antiquity, Oxford 1993). And the Bible, with its text, provides support for both of these aims.