Doerfler begins in medias res, by analyzing an episode from the Vita Melaniae Iunioris. When a fetus died during childbirth, the mother became “neither able to live or die” (71, citing the vita). Melania the Younger then miraculously saved the woman’s life – but did not heal the child in her womb. For Doerfler, this “incomplete miracle” gives a glimpse into late ancient thought about children and even about ascetic women. First of all, the fact that something so tragic – the death of a child – is passed over so lightly indicates that infant mortality was distressingly normal in late Antiquity. Doerfler also sees this story as a metaphor: only through the intervention of a saint – only through asceticism – can a woman overcome the bonds of biological motherhood and marriage to reach “the fullness of life in Christ” (72). Doerfler sees a similar pattern in the story of Melania the Elder, whose husband and two sons died at the same time. Jerome claims that instead of mourning excessively, Melania saw the tragedy as an opportunity to serve Christ and God with greater devotion. Even Melania the Younger was “blessed” in this way: after her child’s early death, her husband gave his assent to “live together in chastity thenceforth” (74).
Doerfler recognizes that these tales reveal little about “real” feelings around infant mortality and parental bereavement. Rather, the accounts presented provide a glimpse of the rhetorical strategies employed by the Church Fathers. On the one hand, the ascetics praised breaking biological bonds between mothers and offspring and relinquishing hope of more children. On the other hand, the ascetics did not reject motherhood. Indeed, they saw the women’s adoption of ascetic practice as a way to become greater mothers by adopting spiritual children. A prominent example of this is provided by Melania the Younger’s visit to Constantinople. There, the Empress Eudocia – in Gerontius’ words – “received her with every honor, as Melania was a true spiritual mother” (76). Doerfler contends that “relations of spiritual mentorship” between women often used “maternal terms” (77). This rhetoric was based on the real bonds between mothers and their (biological) children in late Antiquity. In the view of Jerome and John Chrysostom, these kinds of relationships are only made stronger by “shared ascetic devotion” in monastic contexts. A good example is Jerome’s attitude to “little Paula.” In Epistle 107, he recommends that she be pledged from birth to a life of asceticism – a member of not only the Roman but also the Christian monastic elite. Drawing from Rebecca Krawiec, Doerfler recognizes that even the famously antifamilial Jerome “demonstrate[s] an investment in ascetic genealogies” (79).
In sum, Doerfler argues that Christian writers “labored to rescript women’s experiences of renunciation” (80) in order to incorporate the important roles of wife and mother. The Vita Melaniae Iunioris illustrates how renouncing the motherhood that is “corporeal, painful, ultimately producing nothing but death” in favor of that which is “spiritual, joyful, and genuinely life-giving” (80) sets one free to serve, nourish, and revive many. Whether most non-ascetics followed this rhetoric is another question entirely; Doerfler stresses, again, that the “male ascetics who composed, translated, and copied these texts … were preoccupied less with ordinary households, women, and mothers than with their expediency as metaphors and their usefulness in theological debates” (81). Ultimately, what Doerfler convincingly demonstrates is that late ancient women “had to negotiate their existence between experience and metaphor, their roles both defined and circumscribed within a male framework of textuality” (81). Like Elizabeth Clark, Doerfler is very successful at working with texts to make them yield up their ideological content; however, her reliance on literary sources (abetted by an unclear structure) constrains the power of her thesis.