Monastic Materialities: Space, Sexuality, and Subjectivity in Late Antiquity

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Religious Studies

First Advisor

Davis, Stephen

Abstract

Historians often imagine monastics as sexless beings, defined solely by self-discipline, austerity, and celibacy. Monastic Materialities challenges this reductive narrative, revealing that in late antique Egypt (300-800 CE), monastic spaces engendered monastic sexualities and, in doing so, made the monk. Far from being inert backdrops, monastic spaces were imbued with affective and sensorial qualities that generated desires and deviancies, attachments and intimacies. Monastic Materialities proposes a new paradigm: sexuality is not an intrinsic human characteristic but emerges through spatialized assemblages. By foregrounding spatiality, my dissertation makes claims that transcend the study of antiquity: sexual subjectivities are inseparable from the spaces we inhabit, and sexuality itself extends beyond the bounded individual body to the nonhuman realm. Bringing together archaeological evidence from my fieldwork in southern Egypt with archival, documentary, epigraphic, papyrological, and literary sources, Monastic Materialities is deeply informed by new materialism and queer studies. The project unfolds over three chapters, each centered on a gendered binary that has informed the study of monasticism: man vs. woman, animate vs. inanimate, city vs. wilderness. Chapter 1, “Segregated by Sex? Monastic Commingling and the Erotics of Death,” complicates the prevalent assumption about monastic spaces as neatly homosocial. Using the women’s monastery at Atripe as a case study, I show how funerary practice served as a site of commingling between the men’s and women’s communities in the same Egyptian monastic federation. I then show how present and anticipated realities of sexual commingling and sexual unification, enacted and envisioned through funerary practice, animated experiences of monastic viewing and visuality. Chapter 2, “Monastic Refectories: Corporeal Convergences and the Construction of Queer Kinship,” explores the inseparability of bodies and buildings and how this entanglement engendered attachments and ancestries. Concentrating on the refectory spaces at the Monastery of Apa Jeremias at Saqqara and the women’s monastery at Atripe, I show how architectural features within these places of eating, such as seating installations and wall paintings, worked in tandem to reconstitute monastic communities into familial relationships and generational genealogies in the absence of biological reproduction. This analysis highlights the role of material culture in crafting alternative modes of relationality and complicates how we apply the category of queer to ancient monasticism. Chapter 3, “Alone in the (Monastic) Crowd: The Isolation of Embeddedness,” reconsiders the imaginaries of isolation and separateness, themes which proliferate in monastic literature and which scholars have recently sought to explain away as a rhetorical trope. Analyzing two Upper Egyptian women’s monasteries located in urban environments, I show how material strategies of surveillance and guarding arranged and embedded monastics in proximate community, while at the same time rendering them strangers to one other. In so doing, I make the case for isolation and separation as affective dispositions mediated through spatial practices, rather than through geographic remove. Premodern historians and archaeologists alike have struggled to apply new materialist notions of assemblage to questions of subjectivity, often reverting to anachronistic, identitarian frameworks. Monastic Materialities provides a new methodological model for engaging archaeological assemblages and theorizing sexuality as a product of spatial and corporeal convergences. It positions late antique Egyptian monasticism as a lens through which to rethink foundational questions about space, sexuality, and subjectivity, offering a novel contribution to both the study of antiquity and contemporary theoretical debates.

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