The project GenTime (Eschatological Time as Women’s Time? Gendered Temporality and Female Holiness in Early Christianity and Byzantium) investigates the nexus between time and the construction of the feminine in Late Antique and Byzantine hagiographical discourses. By looking both at ways time is experienced through the body and construed by society and religion, GenTime engages with a highly debated problem in Byzantine studies: why did female saints progressively disappear over the Byzantine millennium? GenTime argues that this trajectory has to be understood against the eschatological expectations shaping early Christian ideals of female holiness.
The enquiry was informed by three main questions:
1) How does the new notion of the end of time affect early Christian ideas of gendered temporality?
This first research question explored how eschatological tensions shaped gendered time in the apocryphal acts and early vitae and passions, exerting a lasting influence on the relevant narrative patterns. Taking its cue from the Acts of Paul and Thecla, it investigated how these scripts are transformed in late antiquity, by analyzing the process of adaptation in the Byzantine Lives of female saints that look explicitly at Thecla as a model.
2) What happens to entrenched narratives of gendered temporality when the eschatological horizon becomes less urgent?
The second research question focused on the middle Byzantine lives of holy women to highlight the dynamics between different models of temporalities. The analysis showed how the eschatological horizon is explicitly downplayed - if not denied - by the Byzantine lives of women saints.
3) How does the inscription of women’s time into the social practices affect narratives about female sainthood in the Middle Byzantine period?
The third and last research question aimed to prove that the Byzantine lives of women saints pointed to a repossessing of historical, non-eschatological time by female agency, thus showing how a new sense of historical temporality affected policies of holiness in a cenobitic context. The analysis proved that new notions of secular temporalities, emphasizing linear progression within history, emerged. The shift was determined by processes of “domestication” of the eschatological radicalism and by the turn from apocalypticism to a restored notion of historical time. In the same period family became more and more important in Byzantium, with a shift in the role of women.
In consideration of the current state of the art, GenTime is an innovative project: while it tackles a topic presently at center stage in scholarship on early Christianity and Byzantium (gender studies and hagiography), it opens up a new avenue of research, looking at social and gendered constructions of temporality. In addition, through the angle of gender and time, this project adds new meanings to much debated texts, and the focus on the relationship between time and gender also establishes a conversation with modernity, raising awareness on the enduring conflict between different typologies of gendered temporalities.
