Readings of two late fourth-century versions of the tale of the virgin martyr Agnes illumine the place of gender within a late ancient Christian discourse that locates itself in complex relation to both a Christian and a classical past. In Ambrose's account, the tale of Agnes, juxtaposed with that of Thecla, constitutes a reworking of the apocryphal tale of the conversion and witness of a sexually continent woman. In Prudentius' text, allusions to the virginal heroine of classical tragedy represent Agnes as a new Polyxena. Through such intertextual play, the ambiguously gendered virgin martyr emerges not only as a model for the disciplining of the would-be virago of female asceticism but also as a representation of the "body" of a discourse of orthodoxy that deploys the dual rhetorics of martyrdom and empire, inscribing itself as feminine in an ascetic subversion of the masculine discourse of clssical speech, whereby the transcendently male authority of this Christian discourse is paradoxically asserted.
Some three decades ago Michel Foucault sought to reestablish communication between “madness” and “non-madness” by going back to what he called the “zero point” in history at which the distance between reason and madness was first established. In Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, Foucault suggested that returning to this point of initial differentiation requires renouncing all that we as modern persons know to be true about madness and reason. If we are to locate “that realm in which the man of madness and the man of reason, moving apart, are not yet disjunct,” he wrote,we must speak of that initial dispute without assuming a victory, or the right to a victory; we must speak of those actions re-examined in history, leaving in abeyance all that may figure as a conclusion, as a refuge in truth. … Then, and then only, can we… begin the dialogue of their breach, testifying in a fugitive way that they still speak to each other.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.