Analyzes the evidence for the lives of women living in the White Monastery, located in upper Egypt, under its third abbot, Shenoute, who served from 385–464 c.e. Several of Shenoute's letters, which were written in Coptic and survive in fragmentary form, address periods of conflict either between female monks or between the female community and Shenoute. As a result, they differ in genre from any other evidence of female monasticism in late antiquity and so present a unique corpus of material for investigation. A key issue pertains to Shenoute's efforts to establish his monastic authority over the women's community, which was physically separate from the men's, and the evidence for the women's acceptance and resistance to that expansion. I then argue that gender analysis reveals that Shenoute regarded his efforts as part of the creation of a universal monasticism, which had uniform requirements for male and female monks, including the controversial subject of corporal punishment. It simultaneously reveals, however, points of gender asymmetry, and so inequity, within monastic authority and practices, some promoted by Shenoute and some by the women themselves. Finally, Shenoute's use of the family as a model for the monastery helped him create kinship bonds among all monks, both those who had left their families and those who brought their relatives with them. Like gender, with which the family is intimately connected, this model also allows Shenoute to negotiate tensions and contradictions using egalitarian language while simultaneously constructing patriarchal authority.

Melania the Elder, the “female man of God,” performs several masculine functions throughout Palladius’s Lausiac History, even as he repeatedly defines her as female. In a work based on collective memory, she serves as a source of stories about those in the desert and as a recipient of holy relics from male monks to preserve their memory. Her prominence is particularly noticeable in her relationship with Evagrius, serving as a confessor of his love affair and as his spiritual director in sending him to Egypt. Palladius therefore creates a social memory of Melania as both female and male, making her a counter to the women associated with the ascetic writer and teacher Jerome. These women appear as extensions of the argument about gender that were part of the Origenist controversy. Jerome’s women are properly female, subordinate to male teaching, while Palladius’s Melania has a gender ambiguity.

The coexistence of two apparently contradictory attitudes towards gender in Shenoute's monasticism engage the variety of literature describing female monastic experiences in late antiquity. This chapter describes the evidence for Egyptian monasticism, including virgins living in the cities, the desert mothers of Upper Egypt, and the female community under Pachomius; the dual monasteries of Jerome and Paula in Palestine; and a letter by Augustine written to a female monastery undergoing conflicts of leadership similar to Shenoute's. I conclude that the different nature of the various sources make a one‐to‐one comparison difficult but that, in general, Shenoute seems to have been more willing than his male counterparts to be intimately involved in the female community. I then examine another gender issue of late antique Christianity, namely, the role of eunuchs, especially those who voluntarily castrate themselves. Here I argue that Shenoute was unable to tolerate the presence of these individuals because their sexual ambiguity called into question the essentialism of gender in the construction of the self, as well as the gendered foundations of the monastery.

In his two central monastic texts, theInstitutesand theConferences, John Cassian (c. 360-c.435) draws extensively on tropes of grammatical and rhetorical education. This language helps shape monasticism in ways that are culturally and socially acceptable to the elite, male audience in Gaul to which he is appealing. The effect of this language is not to create a monasticism that is comfortable for the elite but to transform his audience through a process analogous to their traditional education. He invents a new monastic reading culture that uses reading and writing to form the identity of a monk. Like all reading cultures, Cassian's requires a particular form of literacy, defined here as teaching certain reading methods and valuing particular texts. Indeed, Cassian's two works serve as the teaching texts for this monastic literacy and so compete against contemporaneous claims for other forms of monastic instruction. Cassian's texts function as monastic equivalents to rhetorical handbooks (theInstitutes) and works of literary theory (theConferences) and are themselves sublime replacements for “pagan” literature. The epitome of his monasticism, ecstatic prayer, is also described in terms of sublimity thereby appropriating rhetorical values and prestige into a new performance of the elite male self.